I feel very strongly that almost the entire city has copied my glasses. I went to a fashion show during fashion week, and everyone there had on my eyeglasses. Warby Parker has also copied my eyeglasses.
Here’s what started happening: A few years ago, kids—and by which I mean, my friends kids—started coming up to me and saying, ‘Fran, where’d you get those vintage glasses?’
And I said, ‘They’re not vintage. I’ve just owned them for a long time. They are vintage in the way I am.’
I’m not unhappy that everyone has copied me. There was a period when everyone was wearing those black, oblong glasses. These are better.
As with my perfect white shirts, it never occurred to me that they’d stop making my original tortoiseshell eyeglasses—the ones I started with—but then they did. So now I have glasses that are like the originals, sort of like the originals, kind of like the originals…I have made several attempts to recover what I once had.
—Fran Lebowitz, talking style with Elle’s Kathleen Hale. Other highlights of the interview include Lebowitz’s thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s style (“She has no style, zero”); men in shorts (“disgusting”); and what would happen if women tried as hard as drag queens (“We’d be a much more attractive culture”). For more of Lebowitz’s wonderfully singular take on the world, see this 1993 interview with the Paris Review.
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