In preparation for his role in Richard Lester's film How I Won The War, John Lennon was given an army-style haircut and a pair of new glasses to wear.
Lennon's haircut took place in the breakfast room of the bar The Inn On The Heath hotel in Celle, near Hanover, West Germany. The short-back-and-sides, performed by 28-year-old German hairdresser Klaus Baruch, made headlines around the world.
Baruch shaved off Lennon's sideburns, swept back his fringe and greased it down. The cut hair was later burnt to prevent it being sold.
Although the hairstyle proved a temporary measure, the old-fashioned round National Health 'granny' glasses quickly became a trademark of his public image. They became soon fashionable, and he retained the look until the end of his life.
not true. he retired the granny glasses in the last year of his life for the more trendy plastic Sally Jessy Raphael type glasses.
Yes, he was wearing the plastic glasses when he was shot. Yoko made an album cover with a picture of the blood stained glasses. Typical tacky Yoko...
Does anybody know the brand/model of the sunglasses Lennon wore circa Rubber soul? You know, the dark black, squarish, Roy Orbison-esque glasses?I really want to find a pair!
I doubt they still make them over 40 years later.
John wore granny glasses and a full beard as a disguise in Help! He had that Abbey Road look four years early.
If you look closely at the photos from Help when the disguised Lennon looks so presciently 1969 you'll notice small holes in the middle of each lens. They were fake glasses.
i'm also more inclined to believe that this inspired his look. Dick Lester too shares this view in the making of Help documentary. The military issues he wore in How I Won The War were not round, but he and Paul often went out in disguises and he found them useful for a while.
And yeah his eyeballs are so comically huge they'd have to have fake lenses. two or three coke bottle lenses had to have been in those suckers, but they're dead on "lennon glasses"--compare their gold frames to the ones worn in the Strawberry Fields Video--the earliest appearance of them with his prescription. Gold rims, they're practically identical. The How I Won The War glasses were tortoise shell it appears.
Did you know he was leagally blind without them from all those years of not wearing them?
partly true. john was legally blind from a young age, he wore contact lenses. one of the early things cynthia found she had in common with john was at art school, neither of them could see because john refused to wear his contacts in his early years. legal blindness is very common, something like 90% of people who wear glasses are considered "legally blind". If you can't drive without em, you're legally blind. but john was wearing the specs when he passed his first driving test in (i believe) 66.