Wearing sunglasses after early September used to be – how to put this delicately? – a massive red flag of wankerdom. A simple pair of Ray-Bans on a bright December day and you might as well have stepped out of your Lamborghini in your mink coat chowing down on foie gras, for the reaction you’d get. It was, frankly, non-U. The only person who could pull it off was Anna Wintour.
What changed? Well, for a start, our social graces went so far out of the window as to make the wearing or not wearing of sunglasses out of season an irrelevance. At a point in time when plenty of perfectly nice people seem to consider it acceptable to conduct an entire conversation with another human being without glancing up from their phone screen to make eye contact, it can definitely be argued that getting your knickers in a twist about the wearing of shades in winter seems about as relevant as insisting on the use of grape scissors. The world is going to hell in a handcart, my friends. With all due respect, I think that frothing at the mouth with righteous outrage about a pair of shades might be missing the point.
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