Getty Images: Goode, Jeff
Joyce Carol Oates, 1990.
When Joyce Carol Oates, author of more than forty novels, wears glasses, her slender, delicate face gently becomes more eccentric and serious. The oversize glasses she wore in the 1970s and 1980s thoroughly swamped and overpowered Oates’s appearance, to the extent that she looked like she might be wearing a disguise. Whether incognito or not, Oates’s glasses look predated geek chic by decades. She looked quirky, cool, and interesting. In the twenty-first century, Oates’s glasses are thin, wiry, and tinted, with small oval frames that more perfectly fit her face in a growing-old-gracefully fashion.