Fashion statement, personal expression, personal declaration or all the better to see you, my dear. All the above are among the possible reasons some women choose to wear eyeglasses that are far from boring. So much for the poem about boys and girls and glasses and passes.

Marie “Doc” Holliday
Dentist, retailer

The bold glasses gracing Dr. Marie “Doc” Holliday’s face are a bit of a family affair.

Growing up in Fort Worth, she read Vogue magazines with her sister and school counselor mother. Her Baptist preacher father and her mother, the first lady of that church, had to look good, after all. Her mother shopped at Neiman Marcus and Washer Brothers, while her father favored suits from John L. Ashe. They also indulged in custom-made clothing, too.

Holliday learned from her family that looking good was worth the consideration.

“I dress for me,” Holliday said, while wearing a favorite pair of white, oversized cat-eye spectacles to go with her black and white ensemble and trendy purple lipstick. “I dress to feel glamorous, to feel great, to look confident because I am.”

She views her bold glasses as another accessory, just like a scarf, belt or earrings. The eyeglasses, a part of a growing collection of special eyewear, are another family fashion connection. Her sister, Alyce Jones, owner of Adair Eyewear in Fort Worth, keeps Holliday looking good.

The collection began with sunglasses before Holliday actually needed prescription glasses. Shopping at her sister’s business, she realized the style selections were more interesting than just square and round.

“They had more designs,” she said. “That’s when I added eyewear to my accessories.”

Under the lab jacket she wears daily is an entire ensemble, often a mix of separates to suit her mood. And Holliday chooses her glasses as the accessory patients can see easily and often compliment.

Her first unusual pair, CAZALl gold wire rims, date back 30 years and were “cutting edge” for the time. “I get so many compliments with that frame,” she said of the glasses she still sports regularly. “It’s unbelievable.”

Another pair, round and Elton John-inspired, are black and white horizontal stripes. She mostly favors designer brands like the Versace pair swirled with red, blue, yellow and green she’s had for at least six years. Her newest are the Yves St. Laurent glasses she just ordered after seeing actress Queen Latifah on TV wearing them during the Emmy Awards.

“Fashionable eyewear is like a fine fragrance,” said Holliday, who also owns Marie Antoinette Parfumerie and Flowers to Go. “No matter your complexion, body type, height, there is a design for everyone, female and male.”

She keeps a busy schedule that includes sitting on boards ranging from the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce to foundations to the Fort Worth Garden Club. Those board meetings are additional reasons to look her best. So, she’s put her sister on notice that she’s on the hunt for a red pair of glasses to fill a void in her wardrobe.

“That’s the other color that I don’t have,” the wife, mother and step-grandmother said. “I want the right red for me, because red is hot.”

Dena Shaskan
Chef

Pairings can be important, such as choosing the proper wine to go with fish.

Dena Shaskan knows quite a bit about putting things together, like the wine dinners she did for years as chef at Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum to choosing vintages for her newest venture, Wines From A Broad, the new wine retreat she owns in Sundance Square. But as a wife, mother of one and stepmother of five, Shaskan has put other things together — including her eyewear.

What she chooses for eyeglasses are noticeable, memorable and distinctive, a lot like a special wine.

“I would not call myself a fashionista by any imagination,” Shaskan said. “But it can show off my creativity.”

Chefs, she said, don’t wear jewelry. Their chef’s coat signals what they do and who they are. This Fort Worth gal who went to Tanglewood Elementary, Paschal High School and the University of North Texas earned that chef’s coat at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

“Glasses are an accessory you can play around with,” she said, with her characteristic quick laugh.

She has a bold, black pair, but since she wears an abundance of black, she nabbed an identical pair in red. 

“I have a few pairs, but I mainly wear the red pair,” she said. “Once I got ’em, I was thrilled with ’em. I tell people, I love wearing them, and the older I get I don’t really want to wear makeup. So all I have to do is wear red glasses and lipstick. People can’t see beyond that.”

Knowing she can’t wear the red pair with everything, Shaskan has branched out to others. She cares nothing about brands and fondly remembers the days before progressive prescriptions when she could order drawers full of readers for $25 on the internet. Her black and light pink pairs are in constant rotation — the better to go with her Scandinavian coloring. But she’s searching for a “Barbie pink” pair.

With a wardrobe of mostly black “because it matches everything,” Shaskan thinks colored glasses are a great accent.

“Bam! You have a splash of color and you’re not looking goth,” she said, laughing again. “It wakes up my otherwise monochromatic outfit.”

Pairing them carefully with her daily outfits is what she means to do, but with her busy life, she sometimes finds herself leaving the house in the wrong ones, most likely red.

“I’m not really that incredibly self-conscious,” she said. “C’est la vie.”

Sometimes she gets comments on the glasses, often from women peering at her behind their own special specs.

“Cool funky glasses,” she said. “It’s like we’re in a club.”

Wendy Tilley
Yoga instructor

Open the closet in Wendy A. Tilley’s Fort Worth home, and an array of black garments hangs there. Black, usually oversized and unstructured — that’s her basic daily uniform.

The petite and feisty dynamo sees black — with its uniformity and lack of drama — as the ideal color for her life as a human resource professional, North Texas hospital system employee and, most of all, a yoga enthusiast, practitioner and instructor. No thought, no stains, no muss.

But her eyeglasses are different. She selects them thoughtfully, and the bolder the better.

“My clothing is not necessarily what I want people to notice about me,” she said. “I want them to notice my vision. When I put on a pair of glasses, I’m only looking outward at people through clearness.”

Tilley, a wife, mother and dog owner, says she stands 4’11 and ¾ inches “on a good day.” She gives her age as “north of 50,” which might have something to do with why her spectacles are spectacular.

Her first pair of statement glasses were an unusually oversized tortoise shell pair. They were large-framed, compared to her previous glasses, and decidedly noticeable on her petite frame. More statement-making glasses followed. There were her “Adidas look” of blue and white stripes, a series of Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. brand, Zenni’s Iris Apfel Collection and an understated pink and gold leopard pair. The ones that get the most notice, though, are her black and white polka-dotted pair, but she has no true favorite in her treasure of six or seven prescription glasses.

“My favorite glasses are the ones where I can see well.”

That’s the important part.

“My vision through my glasses allows me to identify people as not all one type,” Tilley said. “As a yoga practitioner, I identify, realize and recognize that people of which I come in contact have multiple levels and layers and can’t be lumped into one category. I want people to know I see them.”

Connie Valenti
Stylist

Call it self-expression or call it rebellion, choosing distinctive glasses was a way for Connie Valenti to break out of a cookie-cutter dress code requirement.

Following a divorce, Valenti started a new life as a barista at Starbucks, where insurance was part of her part-time employment package. With that benefit came the job requirement to wear navy, black or tan. When she needed reading glasses, it was her chance to break free and reclaim her lost sparkle.

 “It let me come back to what I was,” she said. “I wanted some fun glasses. I wanted something that showed my personality. More fun, more memorable.”

She’s now returned to the fashion career she always loved. A former buyer, she’s now a fashion stylist who helps other women find their own style. It’s a creative outlet for her.

“What I like about fashion, I call it a puzzle,” she said. “It’s a game. If I weren’t having fun I wouldn’t be doing it. That’s the part I like about it. You put your own twist on it.”

For her, the outfit — never black — comes first, and then she chooses her glasses from a trio of distinctive spectacles. Her first pair of prescription glasses had a mix of purple, turquoise, pink and orange with hand-painted gold temples. The second were leopard print with an extra piece above the bridge. The third? Purple wood with a silk overlay.

“I literally get asked three times a day where I get my glasses,” she said. “It’s like my lipstick. It’s my signal to the world I’m ready.”

She’s from a creative family, the baby of six with parents who were DIYers at home. She herself now lives in a “she-shed” in an explosion of color and patterns and has driven a pink VW convertible and a turquoise Mini Cooper. “Maybe when I was younger, I didn’t have the confidence to wear these glasses, but now I do or I don’t care,” she said.