Doreen 017

Nowadays, the cat eye era is associated with extravagant glasses of the "Dame Edna" type. In reality, many of the glasses seen in the streets around 1960 looked more like this pair shown by Doreen.

Last year I did a photo shoot with a young model in the old part of my native Amsterdam. It was a cold day so the final part of her photo shoot was done in an optician's shop. When looking at their frames, I remarked to the staff that their shop always stood out because of the wider array of design - regardless the fashion of the year, they always had cat eye glasses for sale. The young man was pleased with the compliment but he added, "Cat eye glasses don't suit many faces". I left it at that because we had little time left to finish our photo shoot. In their heyday, cat eye glasses suited many faces but not every face. More important, money was scarce and glasses were quite expensive. Few ladies could afford more than one pair so it made sense to keep the frame choice on the safe side, even more so when the prescription was rather high. There were no high index lenses in those days and no alternatives for glasses. Contact lenses existed but they were not generally available until the late 1960's.

The lenses in this vintage Arco pair are bifocals, made of glass. Plastic lenses were an invention of the mid 1960's. The weight of glass lenses was a disadvantage but the reading segments in bifocal lenses made of glass were almost invisible unless the add was high and the Rx for long distance was quite mild or positive. The first progressive lenses appeared on the market in the late 1960's. During the cat eye era, presbyopia meant a switch to lined bifocals. The dividing line in these Arco glasses is very discrete and just visible in the right lens.