Shutter Shades
Sunglasses with no lenses — just plastic slats, like Venetian blinds for your face. After Kanye West wore a white pair in the "Stronger" video, shutter shades conquered every mall kiosk, party photo, and MySpace profile picture of 2007–2008, despite being objectively worse than sunglasses at everything sunglasses do.
The louvered sunglass is older than its moment: slatted shades date back to the 1950s, got a plastic new-wave revival in early-80s music videos by acts like Simple Minds and Animotion, and spent the late 80s on Macho Man Randy Savage's face as wrestling-promo armor. But the version everyone remembers arrived in 2007, when designer Alain Mikli created a custom 80s-inspired pair for Kanye West, and West wore them through the neon-and-lasers video for "Stronger." The look hit at the exact moment hip-hop was going electro — Daft Punk sample, Akira homages, glow-stick palette — and the glasses became the single most copyable piece of it.
Copied they were. Within months, five-dollar knockoffs in every color hung at mall kiosks, gas stations, and party stores; a company called Shutter Shades, Inc. trademarked the name in 2007, and the term still went generic almost immediately — a New York court later ruled it had become a generic word for the style by at least 2009. They showed up in prom photos, at every college party themed "the 80s" (about a fad from 2007), and in roughly one out of every three MySpace profile pictures of the era, usually paired with a sideways peace sign.
The joke, acknowledged by everyone who wore them, is that shutter shades are non-functional. Most had no lenses at all: the slats neither block UV light nor keep much light out of your eyes — they were sunglasses reduced entirely to attitude. That was the appeal. By decade's end the fad had burned out as fast as it ignited, filed permanently under "2008 in one image": plastic slats, popped collar, flash photography.
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