The Affordable Sunglasses That Look Great on Everyone. (Seriously. Everyone.)
SHOP $95, warbyparker.com
Welcome to The Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
Bear with me here. I swear there's a payoff. But first, I'm gonna tell you about A Work Thing I Did. A couple years ago, a little group of us around the Esquire offices got it into our heads that it'd be a fun idea to do a big ol' story on what sunglasses best fit your face shape. It was illuminating, in two ways. First, I learned that finding someone with each of the many (many!) face shapes we as a culture have decided to classify is no mean feat. Second, I discovered that while our project was not for naught—there really are some sunglasses that work better on squarer or rounder or longer faces—there was also a cheat code.
The up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start of eyewear, it turns out, is the wayfarer. It looks good on everyone. And while many versions are available—including the OG, courtesy of Ray-Ban—there's a very easy and affordable option that deserves your attention. It's the Harris, by Warby Parker.
Parsing all this stuff is a hassle.
Round face? Square? Oval? Heart-shaped? Diamond? Inverted triangle?!? What the actual hell, right? It can be a task to ID your face shape, much less find and try and eventually purchase the frames that should—if your version of that face shape isn't too far from the norm—best complement it. This is, I should be very clear, work that may well be worth your time. I wear eyeglasses throughout my waking hours, and I care about getting a fit off. I'll do a deep dive on a forum or two to make sure my sunglasses are on the level. But shit, man. I can't lie to you. My first true go-to pair of glasses was (you guessed it) a repurposed wayfarer. And it could be yours, too. And you know the reason why.
SHOP $95, warbyparker.com
It really does look great on everyone.
It does! It just does. Whatever alchemy created the Harris's blend of squared and rounded shapes, whatever dark wizardry first enchanted the soft shift from the curved brow to the sharp angles of the temples, I can confidently say: These sunglasses will make you look at least 117 percent cooler. They'll make you look like you can steer a motorcycle and a sailboat. They'll look good with leather jackets and brass-button blazers. And they won't go out of style any time soon. Is that a prediction? Yes! But it's based on nearly seven decades of them not going out of style, so I'm feeling pretty confident.
I'm not going to talk to you about disruption...
...But. Well, there's a reason every dude with an app claimed he had the Warby Parker of Whatever for a long while there. The brand, with its direct-to-consumer approach and better-than-standard materials and construction, is a modern-day standard-bearer for disruption. Sometimes, that's a bummer. (Are we really trying to propose that every. single. marketplace on the planet has been dominated by totally reinventable business practices? They haven't. You're killing me. Please shut up.) But other times, it's great. Eyewear really did benefit from an injection of new ideas, and Warby was critical to that evolution. Credit where it's due.
SHOP $95, warbyparker.com
Photography and prop styling by Ben Alsop
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