The monocle: how an object dies because the wrong people wore it
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Quick thought experiment: picture somebody wearing a monocle. Almost certainly what arrived in your head was a villain. A cartoon tycoon in a top hat with a moustache. An officer with a German accent in a war film. The Monopoly man. Nobody, absolutely nobody, thinks first of a short-sighted clerk in 1890 who simply needed to read an invoice and couldn't afford a full pair of spectacles. And yet statistically that was very nearly the entire market.
It began as the opposite of a symbol
The monocle originates in a distinctly unglamorous technical problem: a great many people have one eye considerably worse than the other. Before prescription spectacles with two different lenses became cheap and widely available, correcting a single eye with a single lens was the affordable, portable, sensible answer. It isn't even aristocratic in origin: it descends from a long family of handheld lenses — the quizzing glass, the lorgnette, the pocket glass — which people used in exactly the spirit we now use a phone camera to read a menu, that is, with rather more resignation than style.
What happened next is the most interesting mechanism in the entire history of objects: somebody powerful adopted it, and from that moment the object stopped meaning what it did and started meaning who wore it.
The physics of contempt
The monocle also carried a design misfortune, which is that holding one in place requires you to do something extremely specific with your face: contract the muscle around the eye socket and raise the brow slightly. There is no alternative. It's a mechanical requirement. And it so happens that this gesture is, across virtually every human culture, the universal expression of withering scepticism. The object obliged its owner to wear an expression meaning "you cannot possibly be serious" for the entire duration of use.
Consider the reputational catastrophe. An accessory that forces its wearer to regard everyone else with permanent disbelief, adopted precisely by the social class everybody already suspected of looking down on them. When the monocle reached the salons of nineteenth-century Europe it had to make no effort whatsoever to signify arrogance. The arrogance came as standard, built into the anatomy of the gesture.
And then came the irreversible part
From there it was downhill on a steep gradient. Across the Atlantic, early twentieth-century American political cartooning had already fixed it as the uniform of the trust magnate: top hat, belly, cigar and monocle — a drawing that survives intact on the Monopoly board and that any six-year-old can read without being told. In Europe, the Prussian officer corps wore it for decades as a mark of military caste. And after the Second World War, and several thousand hours of cinema that fixed that image permanently, the verdict was final: you can survive being thought of as posh. You cannot survive being associated with that.
So the monocle died. Not because it stopped working — it works exactly as well as it did in 1890, it corrects one eye, it's light, it fits in a pocket — but because its meaning became impassable. It is probably the clearest case on record of an object murdered by its own users.
The part that concerns us
And here is what actually matters, because it applies to everything people put on their faces. An object has no morality of its own. It has no social class, no ideology, no good or bad intentions. It is a piece of glass and a ring of metal. Everything it "means" was placed on top of it by us, collectively, over decades, according to who wore it first, how they behaved while wearing it, and who they hurt.
Which works in both directions, and that's the cheerful part. The white T-shirt was soldier's underwear. Denim was workwear for people who wrecked their knees. Military boots ended up on the feet of half the music scene of the century. Objects ride the social lift up and down constantly, and the floor is never chosen by the factory. It's chosen by the street.
A note on latitude is worth making here. In northern Europe, clothes and accessories have traditionally been used in order not to stand out — to belong to a group quietly, with a notably disciplined economy of signals. In the south we use exactly the same garments for the opposite purpose: to announce which neighbourhood we came from, who we go about with and whose side we're on, and we do it with a shamelessness a Swede would find frankly exhausting. Two opposite strategies, one shared underlying fact: nobody has ever dressed purely to be covered.
Which is why at RAVAL we take "All Humans Welcome" seriously. It sounds like a slogan, but it's mostly a reading of the monocle. No object has class of its own. The gaze has class, and the gaze belongs to whoever is wearing it.
Why did the monocle disappear? Not for technical reasons — it still works — but cultural ones. It became attached to the arrogant aristocrat, to the trust magnate of political cartoons and to the German officer corps, and that symbolic load made it unwearable after the Second World War.
RAVAL designs eyewear in Barcelona, in El Raval. All Humans Welcome.
