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Although it was for a good cause, Geoff Trattner sometimes wishes he hadn't donated all those oversized, eighties glasses to Operation Eyesight two years ago. “I just never thought the big, ugly frames would ever sell again,” says the co-owner of Trattner Optical, the Calgary company his father began in 1961.

In the past few months, the store has sold more than 30 pairs of what's left of the bulky frames, including chunky coloured plastic ones, big clear secretary styles (think Dustin Hoffman's female character in Tootsie), even Napoleon Dynamite-like dorky metal frames. Many styles are unisex.

“We are not a high-moving store when it comes to inventory so when we sell a dozen frames in a month, that's a lot,” he says.

Yes, the vintage kids are at it again. And this up-from-the-cool streets phenomenon is now influencing the larger eyeglasses story. The oversized 1980s specs may be on the extreme style edge, but big and clunky and colourful plastic is the predominant direction the mainstream market is heading.

For Dylan Maas, 27, the owner of Frontside, a skate and snowboard shop in Okotoks, Alta., the ideal frame would be a Cazal just like the ones D.M.C. from the 1980s hip-hop group Run D.M.C. sported. Unfortunately, Maas couldn't find a pair that fit his budget, so he took plastic oversized aviator sunglasses and replaced the lenses with prescription ones. He now rocks more of a Terry Richardson look, but for those who don't know the famed photographer, it might as well be the grade-school-geek look.

Necessity mothered this trend, says Amin Mamdani, vice-president of operations at Toronto's Josephsons Opticians, who has been tracking the trend, which is already on fire in Toronto, following New York of course.

“Even before the designers came out with this, there's been an influence coming from the style leaders. About four years ago, I'd have people coming in with these huge frames, some of them originally sunglasses. They'd say they found them at a flea market, or they had dug them out of their mom's chest of drawers, and they wanted me to make them into their prescription,” he says.

“These clients were quite quirky in the way they wore things,” he continues (read: avant-garde, the sexy secretary/hot librarian look we are working in these pictures).

“But the revival has grown beyond the trendsetters. Designers are now following their lead; [British label] Oliver Goldsmith has re-released its original heavy signature styles.”

And the original eighties labels, he says – Emmanuel Khan, Paloma Picasso, Neostyle and Cazal, all out of New York in that oversized period – are heating up eBay. “I tracked one pair of Cazal's for a client. We sold them in 1983 for $350 a pair. They were $400 to $500 now online!”

A boon to retro packrats indeed. Throughout his years in the business, Trattner's father, who passed away a couple of years ago, never threw anything away and had boxes in the basement filled with frames from every decade.

The family wasn't surprised when clients came asking for fifties and sixties vintage cat-eye frames, as the style was classic and sophisticated. But when the first young woman came in wanting the 1980s bug-eye glasses – the style most often worn by the kid who was picked on in school – Trattner was floored.

“Before, it was that people would come in and try them on and laugh,” he says. “But now, we have very attractive young ladies come in and put them on and they seriously ask how they look and you don't want to say ‘terrible' but, they're still ugly.”

According to Julia Basin Rapp of Toronto's Rapp Optical, we're now seeing geek chic go mainstream. About time: “It's been 10 years of the Donald Rumsfeld frame; people get bored,” Rapp says. “Vintage and vintage-inspired is a huge reaction to colourless, listless and rimless.”

Designers are definitely following the cool kids, she says. But the market is also being driven by boomer needs: “Progressive lenses work best on big frames,” she says, “as in glasses with vertical depth.”

When it comes to true vintage frames – if you can find them – it's all about quality.

“Stuff was built to last back then,” Rapp says. “With true vintage, there is something about an old frame, an elegance and the beauty of longevity. ... They are relics of a bygone time.”

But as the decades turn, it's the eighties that are still hot, says fashion stylist Leah Van Loon, 37, who has worn vintage cat-eye glasses since she was a teen, the trend is being driven simply by the decade fashion is currently revisiting.

“Especially for that demographic that never even really lived in the eighties,” she says. “These big styles are wacky, different and no one else is going to have them.”

As a stylist, Van Loon loves playing with the geek-chic look and acknowledges that spectacles in general have become popular with designers in some of the recent shows as well as in magazine editorials.

But when it comes to the oversized eighties dork glasses, some trends should be left to the pretty young things, Van Loon says.

“Young people have the luxury of making themselves look not the best,” she says. “It's great when you are 20 and you can afford to put on a pair of ugly glasses and still be fabulous, but when you're 40 and you put on an ugly pair of glasses, they're just ugly.”

Special to The Globe and Mail