From Cruella to Clark Kent: why Hollywood sees glasses as ‘the world’s cheapest facelift’

It could have gone either way. I was at Shepperton Studios with Emma Stone and the production team of Cruella, the Disney film charting the 101 Dalmations baddy’s rise to notoriety as criminal mastermind and dogs’ worst friend. Emma, who plays the eponymous villain, had just stepped off a flight from LA so I was conscious I had to be quick. I'd already created 15 eyewear designs from studying photos of her and reading the Cruella script, even though her character wasn’t initially meant to be wearing glasses at all.

But the moment I saw her, I blurted out: “Ah, seeing you in person, I’m not sure these’ll fit or look good…” Not my finest opening line.

I quickly added how I thought playing with the structure, style and shape of glasses could help communicate her character’s transformation from demure fashion designer Estella into the evil anti-heroine Cruella. At the beginning, she could be seen in lovely soft round frames which become more pointed as her journey unfolds and then disappear completely as Cruella is unveiled. Almost like a spectacle striptease. (Though thankfully I didn’t say that.)

While I was gabbling on, Emma had picked up a pair. She declared ‘They’re amazing!' And, from then on, her character was wearing glasses in the film.

While costume design is rightly considered an integral part of any film production, I’d argue that spectacles also play a crucial, if often unsung role. And not just because I design them. Like clothes or lighting, eyewear can be used to influence an audience’s reaction towards the characters on screen.

From the dawn of film, glasses featured in Hollywood, mainly as props, often for comic effect, and, of course, most famously by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup and other Marx Brothers movies.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s that they began to command respect. None more so than when Gregory Peck gave his Oscar-winning turn as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. His scholarly, tortoiseshell frames could have picked up an award themselves. Light, simple but authoritative, they gave Atticus the required level of gravitas for his famous courtroom scenes.

The star who took them to another level altogether was Michael Caine. Instead of acting semi-blindly (as so many did at a time before contact lenses and laser surgery) he chose to make spectacles his trademark. As the no nonsense Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, his strong, bold specs conveyed a similarly uncompromising impression.

Perhaps the most notable screen pair of all belongs to Clark Kent in the Superman movies. I grew up on the original films though, even as a child, I had to suspend my disbelief that Clark Kent’s glasses disguised his true identity. Nonetheless, Christopher Reeve’s large, slightly nerdy, rounded frames were used as a very obvious distraction – alongside his helmet hair.

Years later, I was commissioned to design the specs for Henry Cavill’s Clark Kent. The brief was for something ‘really cool’. But this came with a problem. ‘He’ll then look cooler than Superman himself,’ I told the costume designer. So I came up with some rounder curved frames to jar with Cavill’s square-jawed features and make him (a little) less handsome.

Sometimes glasses are used simply to keep characters frozen in time. In the Harry Potter films, they don’t evolve – they just get bigger in size as Daniel Radcliffe turns from boy to man. The objective is clearly to keep Harry the boy in our minds – even though, as the series progresses, Radcliffe’s voice has long since dropped and he’s sporting a serious shadow.

They are used more effectively in another franchise, The Matrix. When characters are in the films’ simulated reality, they all wear sunglasses – to make the distinction clear between reality and fantasy. But there are more subtle differences too. The agents wear rimless frames – softer shapes than the more aggressive cat-eye wraps of the ‘heroes’ in the matrix. This subconsciously tells the viewer who is the better warrior.

My initial brief for Cruella, set in 1970s London, was just a single pair of glasses for Emma Thompson’s character. But having studied the archives, I pointed out that practically every adult in London at that time was wearing glasses. Before I’d left the meeting, my commission had risen to 120 pairs – almost the entire cast.

Cruella is my 12th Hollywood film. It’s always a fun challenge – even though time is always against you and you often don’t see the actors until you sit down for your first fitting.

In the early days, I was forced to make a few cheeky visits to Madame Tussauds to get the most accurate measurements of famous actors’ heads. Years later, the tables turned when Madame Tussauds’ management contacted me asking for my measurements of Ed Sheeran, who is one of my clients.

In the film world, I’ve been lucky enough to design glasses for characters played by Rowan Atkinson, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland, among others. The only person who refused a pair of my specs was Johnny Depp – a glasses wearer himself, he thought they’d make him look too similar to his real-life persona.

But the truth is that a pair of spectacles can entirely change an audience’s perception of you, for better or worse. As a client told me recently, glasses are "the world’s cheapest facelift". No wonder they’re so popular in Hollywood.

Cruella is in cinemas now