James Bond and his double-O successor fall thousands of feet through the sky in a tin, foldable glider. They plummet towards an island crawling with armed henchman. There's a lot of poisonous flora and fauna. The comms system with HQ stops working. Lashana Lynch, the designated pilot, hasn't even steered one of these things before. But no bother, old chap! Put your enigmatic sunglasses on, prepare to slaughter hundreds of people and think of England.
As another entry in cinema's long and winding tradition of giving really good sunglasses to morally bereft people, Craig's sunglasses are up there with Scarface, and Marsellus Wallace of Pulp Fiction. They're classic, but not overtly so. They're aviators, but without the softcore porno vibes of the big Seventies menswear renaissance. And they're actually wearable. Most of us can actually pull them off. Which, understandably, comes as a bit of a surprise. Bond was created purely to exist within a fantasy realm. He is a traditional (if not deeply outdated) paragon of masculinity. That means many long to be like him, and the ambition is heightened because we will never be like him. In real life, MI6 is less foldable gliders in the South Pacific, more filming an empty doorway in Prague for 52 hours straight.
But that doesn't mean we can't play dress up – and we can do so in sunglasses that can actually work for real life too. The label in question: Vuarnet. As a brand previously worn by Craig in Spectre, the storied Parisian has peddled clean, classic shades since 1957, and makes not one but two appearances in No Time To Die. The first being his retired professional BBQ dad phase in Jamaica. He wears a slimmed down Wayfarer that is called – wait for it – the Legend 06 (which, bit of trivia for you, was the preferred pair of a La Piscine era Alain Delon). And, in the aforementioned suicide mission, we see a pair of aviators named the Edge 1613.
Both are solid. Both are Bond. Both are proof that 007 likes his sunglasses like he likes his distant girlfriends: very French, and very opaque.
