Why Did People Used To Wear Monocles?

Joseph Chamberlain wearing monocle

In the world of eyewear, few accessories have captured the imagination quite like the monocle. Widely regarded today as an eccentric throwback from an earlier age, the monocle began life as a fairly simplistic and imperfect device for correcting eyesight. But something odd happened during the 19th century: The unassuming corrective lens began taking on an entirely new significance as a powerful symbol of class, intellectual prowess, and cultural identity.

But why did this simple optical device evolve into a status symbol? And why did people start wearing monocles in the first place, when spectacles — those of the two-lens variety — had been around since the 13th century? Here’s a close look at why people used to wear monocles, and why the curious eyepiece ultimately went out of fashion.

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The Origins of the Monocle

The origin of the monocle is somewhat blurry. It likely developed from the “quizzing glass,” which was a magnifying lens on a handle that was held up to the user’s eye to aid in reading or inspecting objects. The monocle, of course, did away with the handle altogether, and was instead held in place by the eye socket itself.

Monocles helped with reading small print and other tasks requiring near vision. They also had the benefit of allowing both hands to be used freely (unlike the quizzing glass) while also being easy to carry, slipping comfortably into a top pocket.

Monocles, however, have one obvious issue: They correct vision in only one eye. This might be fine for someone with anisometropia, in which only one eye needs correcting, but virtually all monocle users require optical correction in both eyes.

This issue was being discussed by medical practitioners as far back as the early 1800s — and their comments were often critical. An anonymous German treatise published in 1824 stated, “The monocle with which a single eye is used must be avoided because it disturbs the balance of binocular vision.” The same year, London optician William Kitchener warned, “This pernicious plaything will most assuredly in a very few years bring on an imperfect vision in one or both eyes.”

The Monocle as a Fashion Statement

By that time, eyeglasses with lenses for both eyes had already been around for several centuries; they were invented in Italy in the 13th century and became increasingly sophisticated over the years. So why were monocles so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries? In a word: fashion.

One of the first well-known monocole adopters was the Prussian antiquary Philipp von Stosch, a highly influential art and antiquities dealer in the 18th century. (He also happened to be a spy for the British government.) Von Stosch was a notable figure in European high society, and is widely credited with having made the monocle a fashionable accessory.

In Britain, it’s possible that monocles became popular among theatergoers in the early 1800s — a theory presented by Pitt H. Herbert in his 1950 essay “An Eye on the Monocle” — and from there spread to the upper classes, primarily as a matter of style. The Austrian inventor J.F. Voigtlander, who was studying optics in London, introduced the monocle to Vienna in 1814, helping the new fashion spread to Russia and Germany.

By this point, monocles had been wholeheartedly adopted by the rich and powerful, particularly in England and Germany. (According to Herbert, monocles arrived in America in the 1880s, with the fad reaching its height around 1913, but they never became as popular in the U.S. as they were in Europe.) Style quickly overcame any practical purpose, and people began wearing monocles purely as a fashion accessory, with no actual need of a corrective lens — many monocle lenses were made of plain glass with no corrective properties at all.

By the 1830s, the eyewear had completed its strange transformation. Monocles were no longer primarily used as a visual aid, but had taken on a new life as a fashion accessory representing education, refinement, and social standing.

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The Monocle’s Decline

In Britain, the craze began to fade by the end of the 1830s. But monocles didn’t disappear entirely for at least another century; they were still worn in British high society, whether by members of Parliament or well-dressed dandies. By the beginning of the 20th century, the monocle had even become a cultural symbol. Political cartoonists and playwrights used the eyepiece as visual shorthand for the privileged classes — often as a symbol of pomposity and snobbery. But it wasn’t the satirizing of the monocle that led to its fall from grace — it was war.

The monocle was fashionable in Germany, where it was popular among the German aristocracy as well as military leadership. During both World War I and World War II, many notable German generals wore monocles, including World War I General Erich Ludendorff, and the Nazi field marshals Walter von Reichenau and Walter Model, to name but a few. It was this association that ultimately brought about the monocle’s decline, as the eyewear fell out of favor in much of Western Europe and the United States in the wake of these conflicts. Today, the monocle exists primarily as a historical curiosity, a nostalgic and eccentric symbol of pretension and intellect.