Framed! Elton John

If you ever have a conversation with a non-spectacle person about your job, you can bet that the subject of Elton John will come up at some point.

It's as if he is somehow the patron saint of spectacles. Well let's assume he is, how did we get in this ridiculous position?

You probably know that Elton John is not Reginald Dwight's real name, but did you know that his full stage name is Elton Hercules John? Well there is a lot I didn't know about Sir Elton until I delved a little before writing this month's Framed!

I don't like his spectacles and never have. Yes you do associate him with eyewear but you don't really think, 'Oh yes, Elton John, great spectacles!' For someone so famous for his eyewear it really surprises me that he really doesn't suit them.

I'm guessing a little here but from what I can tell this is a reasonably accurate account of Elton's spectacle history: As a young budding musician Reggy was losing a little hair but found that when he dressed like his hero Buddy Holly he looked rather cool.

As his hair receded the specs got larger and more flamboyant. An extravagant character already, Elton embraced the silly specs and for a live show in the 70s paid $5,000 for a bespoke pair which lit up with his name. His stadium success boosted him to mega stardom and as a performer, anything which can make you larger than life is a bonus. A trademark was born.

Fastforwarding a few decades we see a new head of hair and with it, a curtailing extravagance on the bins. Now this is not the end of his love affair with eyewear but the crazy plastics and Donald Duck shapes have gone and in their place some smaller but colourful spectacles start to appear.

The end of the 90s saw a West End play called Elton John's Spectacles and a few years later a recently lasered Sir Elton sells much of his collection for charity.

Well that's all nice and tidy and should be the end of that. But no. With his recent marriage - sorry - civil partnership, our industry spokesperson needs a new pair of jars to get wed in and what optician or designer wouldn't want the job of selling him those?

The honour went to LA Eyeworks, which you probably know make rather nice frames and have done so for around 25 years. He chose a nice model - the Titanium Towbar - and gave a nod towards extravagance with some purple lenses.

The problem is that despite it all, this man really can't wear a normal pair of glasses, he just doesn't have the face for it. The wedding frames were too small; they stood out because they didn't fit. With a nice chubby face like that Sir Elton only needed a couple of millimetres' width on each lens to fit.

Can you believe that someone actually asked me if I was upset that Elton John had had his eyes lasered? Who wouldn't want a crack at solving Elton's eyewear problems goes the thinking. But first I'd ask about the laser surgery. Didn't work? What a shame! Still, at least he's trying to do something different and us Brits are famous throughout Europe for boring eyewear, perhaps he's not such a bad patron saint after all.