Bono has a party trick. When anyone asks the U2 singer why he insists on always wearing his signature, blue-tinged sunglasses (you know, the wraparound Chanel jobs permanently clamped on to his front-of-house, the ones that replaced the Cutler and Gross "fly's eyes" model he wore circa Achtung Baby) he will explain, with refreshing honesty, that his shades actually provide a kind of instant stellar petrification. That without them on, he just looks like an ordinary little Irish man. "Look," he will say lifting them on and off, up and down, "rock star with them on ... ordinary bloke without them. Rock star/ordinary bloke, rock star/ordinary bloke ..."
Truth is, we are all a little bit Bono in the face furniture department these days. Look around you and you will see that wearing sunglasses all year round, summer and winter, sunshine and rain, inside and outside, on your face or even on top of your head, is not quite the gauche, self-regarding faux pas it used to be.
Why not? Of all the weapons in the fashion accessory arsenal, sunglasses are the most pretentious and unnecessary. It could be argued that global warming and more sunshine have helped turn us into a shaded nation. But their original, practical applications are long forgotten. Sunglasses have nothing to do with protecting our eyes from the sun's harmful rays and are all about creating an image, a kind of instant glamourflage in the nasty outside world. Yes, we put on a pair of shades when the sun comes out but, at the fashion end of the spectrum, we will also put them on to make a statement.
Without our sunglasses we are ordinary Joes/Janes, but just buy a pair of, say, knock-off Ray-Ban aviators from H&M and suddenly a transformation occurs; we become stars in our own private magazine drama. Instead of being dreary civilians, we are important/glamorous/famous/tortured/jetlagged/wasted/mysterious/ wronged/hungover/officious/dodgy/grieving/heartbroken/pleading not guilty, etc.
Among the Hello!stocracy, sunglasses have become a serious addiction, a can't-leave-the-house-without-them essential on a par with credit cards and mobile phones. I first became aware of this back in the late 1990s when I went round to Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit's north London house to do an interview. By the front door, in a shallow tray, where the rest of us keep our car keys, the dog lead and a stack of unopened windowpane letters from the tax man, Mr and Mrs Cool Britannia had about 50 pairs of designer shades ready to put on whenever they left the house. I am sure they would have maintained that the strobing paparazzi flashes that they experienced every time they left the house would have hurt their eyes, but you also got the impression they knew that, without them, Kensit would have been just an actor with a husky voice and Liam a beery bloke from Manchester in an anorak.
The permanently shaded state is now a global aspiration endorsed by the skinny, pie-eyed, knickerless characters who inhabit gossip magazines and tabloids. Paris Hilton, a woman whose whole life is always tinted by sunglasses or blacked-out limo glass (or just the all-pervading fug of simple-minded vacuity), wears those big Sunny Mann-redux glasses that render her a turbo-famous rich bitch and timorous meerkat all at the same time. She wears them for court appearances, parties and red-carpet events.
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