El monóculo: cómo un objeto muere porque la gente equivocada lo llevó puesto
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Quick mental test: think of someone with a monocle. Almost certainly, what came to mind is a villain. A cartoon tycoon with a top hat and mustache. An officer with a German accent in a war movie. The Monopoly man. No one, absolutely no one, first thinks of a nearsighted accountant from 1890 who just needed to read an invoice and couldn't afford full glasses. And yet, statistically, that was almost the entire market.
It started as the opposite of a symbol
The monocle was born from a very unglamorous technical problem: many people have one eye much worse than the other. Before prescription glasses with two different lenses were cheap and accessible, correcting just one eye with a single lens was the cheap, portable, and reasonable solution. It isn't even an aristocratic invention by origin: it comes from a long family of handheld lenses—the quizzing glass, the lorgnette, the pocket glass—that people used exactly the way we use the zoom on our phones today to read a menu: with more resignation than style.
What happened next is the most interesting mechanism in the history of objects: someone with great power adopted it, and from then on, the object stopped meaning what it did and started meaning who was wearing it.
The physics of disdain
The monocle also had a design misfortune: to hold it, you must, obligatorily, do one very specific thing with your face: contract the muscle around your eye and slightly raise your eyebrow. There is no alternative. It is a mechanical requirement. And it just so happens that this gesture is, in practically all human cultures, the universal expression of scornful skepticism. The object forced you to wear a "are you seriously telling me that?" face for as long as you had it on.
Imagine the reputational disaster. An accessory that forces its user to look at others with permanent disbelief, adopted precisely by the social class everyone already suspected of looking down on them. When the monocle arrived in 19th-century European salons, it didn't have to make any effort to signify arrogance: the arrogance came as standard, incorporated into the anatomy of the gesture.
And then came the point of no return
From there, it was all downhill, and at a very steep angle. On the other side of the Atlantic, early 20th-century American political caricature had already pegged it as the uniform of the great trust magnates: top hat, belly, cigar, and monocle—a drawing that survives intact to this day on the Monopoly board and that any six-year-old can read without anyone explaining it to them. In Europe, the Prussian officer corps wore it for decades as a badge of military caste. And after the Second World War and thousands of hours of cinema that cemented that image forever, the verdict was final: one can survive being considered posh, but not being associated with that.
So the monocle died. Not because it had stopped working—it works exactly as well as it did in 1890, it corrects an eye, it's light, it fits in a pocket—but because its meaning became impassable. It is probably the clearest case in existence of an object murdered by its own users.
The part that interests us
And here is what we truly care about, because it is an idea that applies to everything people put on their faces. An object has no inherent morality. It has no social class, no ideology, no good or bad intentions. It is a piece of glass and a metal rim. Everything it "means" has been placed upon it by us, collectively and over the course of decades, based on who wore it first, how they behaved while wearing it, and who they hurt.
Which works in both directions, and that is the optimistic part. The white T-shirt was a soldier's undershirt. Jeans were work pants for people who wore out their knees. Military boots ended up on the feet of half the music scene of the century. Objects constantly go up and down in the social elevator, and whoever decides the floor is never the factory: it’s the street.
A note on latitude is appropriate here. In northern Europe, clothing and accessories have traditionally been used not to stand out, to integrate into a group without making noise, with a remarkably disciplined economy of signals. In the south, we use the exact same garments for the opposite: to announce what neighborhood we come from, who we hang out with, and which side we are on, and we do it with a brazenness that a Swede would find frankly exhausting. Two opposing strategies and the same underlying fact: no one dresses just to cover themselves.
That is why at RAVAL we take "All Humans Welcome" seriously; it sounds like a slogan, but it is, above all, a reading of the monocle. No object has class on its own. The gaze has it, and the gaze is provided by the person wearing it.
Why did the monocle disappear? Not for technical reasons—it still works—but for cultural ones: it became associated with the arrogant aristocracy, the trust magnate of political cartoons, and the German officer corps, and that symbolic burden made it impossible to wear after the Second World War.
RAVAL designs eyewear in Barcelona, in El Raval. All Humans Welcome.
