The Pop Culture Pundit

Everyone has probably seen the all-too familiar trope of a woman going from ugly to beautiful simply because she takes off her glasses. It’s been used in a Taylor Swift music video, it was practically the plot of She’s All That, and even Amy Santiago from Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Pam from The Office were not immune. Glasses were something to be embarrassed about–a weakness that should be hidden from society unless, God forbid, something horrendous happened to your precious contacts. 

Well, in the year of 2024, a miracle has happened: glasses have become cool. Celebrities are finally normalizing the eyewear, using them as anything from a fashion accessory to a positive advantage. No longer are they something to be ashamed of–they are something to be embraced. 

Take the slew of female pop stars that have recently embarrassed them. Billie Eillish has been seen everywhere with glasses while promoting her third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. Multiple pairs were even featured in her cover story from Rolling Stone with the brand in the captions along with her designer clothes–you can now wear the same Chrome Hearts and Oakley glasses by Billie Eillish as advertised on the pages of a magazine!

Similarly, Doja Cat, Sabrina Carpenter and Reneé Rapp have been photographed wearing glasses while walking down the street going about their normal business. Rapp even wore hers while promoting Mean Girls on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, something her character Regina George would have teased an unsuspecting high school student about. No longer are glasses a nuisance, a roadblock for taking the perfect picture or filming the perfect video because of those pesky blue blockers–they are something that can be embraced, flaws and all, fitting in perfectly with the blurry, red-eye y2k aesthetic that’s currently popular on social media platforms such as Instagram. 

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It’s not just multi hyphenated female superstars embracing this trend. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jake Gyllenhaal opened up about being legally blind, saying “I like to think it’s advantageous” and even using his ultra-blurry vision for a scene in the 2015 movie Southpaw to help him better portray a scene in which his character is told his wife dies. Meanwhile, in the TV miniseries Presumed Innocent, his character Rusty Sabich wears glasses on the regular, tucking them in between the buttons of his white shirt when he’s not using them to look over important documents or walk down a corridor in a frazzled hurry as a prosecutor accused of killing his work colleague, Carolyn Polhemus, whom he also had an affair with.

Another glasses fashion icon is Robert Downey Jr. Though his signature frames are often tinted, they are no doubt a fashion statement. He did wear clear lenses, however, the night he won Best Supporting Actor at the 2024 Academy Awards–and we could tell through his chrome-colored frames that his eyes were filled with joy upon the accomplishment. 

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In 2024, it’s about time we make wearing glasses cool. What was once nerdy, lame, and embarrassing is finally sophisticated, stylish, and slick. In her Spotify Billions Club video, Ariana Grande received 14 plaques representing how many songs of hers that have passed a billion streams. In it, she wears giant glasses that seemingly take up at least half her face–maybe even more–but turns them into an iconic fashion statement. Though those glasses may have been considered awkward and maybe even mortifying at one point, Grande makes them seem effortlessly cool, matching her charismatic persona. Glasses were once something to hide–but with their recent embrace and surge in popularity as a fashion statement, they are something to be proud of.