There’s an old photograph of my father wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators, and I’d wanted a pair since I first saw it. Tom Cruise in Top Gun didn’t help, and after that, Aviators were the only sunglasses I cared about. The moment I could afford a pair, with my first job in Jamshedpur, I bought one with brown lenses.
That phase lasted a couple of years. Then my brother came to visit me in Jamshedpur, and we were wandering down the shopping lane in Bistupur when we passed an eyewear shop. I was wearing the Aviators, and he pushed me to go in and try a Wayfarer. It was a polarised one, and I liked it the moment I put it on. That pair lasted about four years, until I wore it in the water at a water park near Raipur and damaged the lens. I took it to the Ray-Ban store at Magneto Mall, where the salesman said it would be hard to repair because the model had been discontinued. So I tried on the Original Wayfarer Classic instead and bought it.
The polarised pair had one more chapter. A few days later I took it to a shop in Civic Center in Bhilai, where I’d bought a lot of my watches and sunglasses over the years, and asked what could be done. The shopkeeper said he’d send it to Ray-Ban to be checked, and I believed him. Two months went by without a word, so I went back. He told me the glasses weren’t original Ray-Bans. I told him that was bullshit, because I had the bill and the warranty card that came with them, and asked for my glasses back. He said they were being destroyed because they were a forgery. I never shopped there again.
Since then I’ve tried the Clubmaster, the State Street and every other variation Ray-Ban has put out. The Clubmaster is too flamboyant. I even owned a Mega Wayfarer for a while, though it always felt too bulky, and it went missing somewhere on the ride back from Bhilai on Snowpiercer. None of them replaced the original.
“OG” gets thrown around casually now, attached to anything with a few years on it. Few things actually earn it. The Original Wayfarer Classic is one of the rare ones that does.
Dylan was wearing his during the June 1965 sessions for “Like a Rolling Stone.” Muhammad Ali wore them. So did JFK. So did James Dean. Jack Nicholson went further than any of them, once saying, “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 60.” It was fashion then, and now it’s closer to a fixed point. The Original Wayfarer is complete in a way most products never get to be. Ray-Ban has built plenty of variations around it, but the original frame has stayed the same, year after year, because there was never anything wrong with it to begin with.
Recommending fashion to anyone is a gamble. You don’t know their face, their comfort, what they’ll actually wear past the first week. The Wayfarer is the one exception I’d bet on without hesitation. Black frame, green lens, that’s the only combination worth having. Look at the lenses closely and you’ll notice they tilt slightly away from the face instead of sitting flat, and that small detail is most of why the shape works on almost anyone.
I gave my first Original Classic to my friend Sourabh, who rode Spiti with me, and the pair I wear now is my fourth Wayfarer in fifteen years. It’s still the first thing I reach for on my way out the door.
