Fashion statement -- or sheer spectacle?

It takes a special kind of man to wear a monocle. You need to be a 19th century deep thinker, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Karl Marx, or maybe a jackbooted Aryan type, like Col. Klink on "Hogan's Heroes." It works too if you're a jaunty cartoon character with a top hat, like the Penguin from "Batman" or Mr. Peanut from the Planters label.

Now we can add a new category to the accessories list of winking devotees: 21st century gossipmongers of Manhattan.

Last Saturday, on the front page of the New York Times (above the fold, no less), there was a color photograph of an honest-to-goodness monocle-wearing man. Well, maybe honesty and goodness had nothing to do with it; the guy in question was one Jared Paul Stern, a sometime scribe for the New York Post now under investigation after a California tycoon alleged that the writer had tried to extort money from him.

Party photos have made it clear that gossip writer Stern is one of those anachronistic peacocks who wear fedoras, waistcoats, spats, ascots or the other eccentric fashion flourishes that, when worn to a shipyard or a pool hall, scream out: "Punch me hard in the face." But when Stern scrunched his socket on that monocle (the photo that captured the moment was snapped in 2001), he took his personal dandyism to a whole new level. You can argue that a fedora channels the spirit of Bogart and Spillane, but a monocle is just pure Charlie McCarthy. And Charlie McCarthy was, well, a dummy. Sorry. But he was.

History tells us the monocle was devised in the 19th century by the British, who also invented mutton-chop sideburns and the term "harrumph," and all three go together quite nicely. The monocle, like a pocket watch, dangles from a chain or cord and is often accompanied by a fancy vest with pockets. That's why there's still a whiff of upper-crust pretension to the loop accessory; if you have an eye for affectation, the monocle will put you in the same circles as the rich tycoon from the Monopoly box or Eustace Tilley, the veddy proper cartoon mascot for the New Yorker. The rich of London in the 1800s often had plaster casts made of their faces so they could get a comfortable and snug monocle fit -- anyone in the lower class who naively bought the over-the-counter models that became available paid for their overreaching with a sore face.

In the early decades of American film, especially in comedy reels, the monocle was shorthand for stuffy aristocrat. You just knew the guy with the eye loop was going to take a pie from Moe or Curly.