Monocles were the sign of a man hoping to appear to be what he was not: the young hoping to seem mature; the vulgar hoping to seem tasteful; the petty longing for higher status. But that implies the monocle had a moment when it did look cool, leading so many people put their faith in it. If so, that brief instant of Peak Monocle has been lost to history.
Monocles returned to use in the early 20th century as a must-have accessory among the military officers of World War I. Although the eyepieces were worn by soldiers on both sides, the German High Command played the biggest part in reviving them. Members of the Prussian nobility, a German state with a long military tradition, seem to have been completely unaware of the monocle’s history as a comic prop, occupied as they were with their irony-free lifestyle of horsemanship, saber duels, and gymnastics.
In their official portraits, members of the German High Command make monocles seem quite frightening. Wartime propaganda picked up on the signature accessory, deploying it in caricatures of an archetypical German baddie. That image became the progenitor for all the monocle-wearing villains of the 20th century, from Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes to the Marvel Comics scoundrel Wolfgang von Strucker. The vampire muppet Count von Count wore one, and it added to the menacing look of Star Trek’s militant metaspecies the Borg.
The monocle’s first two lives, as foppish accessory and evildoer’s adornment, have persisted into the present. But the apparatus’s last serious vogue, in the early 20th century, is almost entirely forgotten.
As a rule, monocles were a male accessory: If in need of an aid to vision, a woman would use spectacles or a lorgnette, a pair of glasses on a handle. Because the monocle was so strongly gendered, it became a low-key mode of cross-dressing. Trend pieces of the period treated it as a fad—What have those flappers done now?—but it was also taken up by the lesbian community in Montmartre, Paris. In the center of a 1930 photograph of a Parisian nightclub crowd, a woman in tuxedo and cigarette holder flashes her monocle directly at the camera. The gesture seems to carry both a foppish sophistication and a Prussian coldness. This is high fashion, but it is also daring defiance.
Worn in a woman’s eye, the monocle makes an unexpectedly forceful statement of transgression. For once, it isn’t funny in the least. A man in a monocle is putting on airs: He wants to be taken seriously, elevated to a status that he might not hold, but that someone of his sex could. A woman in a monocle doesn’t aspire to be what she isn’t; rather, she takes what she shouldn’t.
An echo of the Montmartre monocle reverberates in Madonna’s 1989 “Express Yourself” music video. Directed by the then-27-year-old David Fincher, it was at the time the most expensive music video ever made. For the first two minutes, Fincher plays things relatively straight—in a Fritz Lang noir world, men wear monocles and Madonna wears glamour couture. Two minutes in, Madonna reappears wearing a double-breasted suit and monocle, advancing straight toward the camera. The 1930s are eerily resurrected, in form and content. Madonna reminds the viewer that you don’t have to accept what you’re given: Don’t go for second best, baby.