The Clark Rockefeller / Superman Connection

One of the highlights of our Wednesday afternoon is reading Jezebel’s “Midweek Madness” post. The blog’s interns run down the highlights and lowlights from the gossip rags so we can save our money for more important things. (Like beer and shoes.)

This week’s installment sheds some light on something that’s been bothering us—what to call those thick black glasses Clark Rockefeller wears. We’ve taken to calling them Clark Rockefeller glasses (what it lacks in creativity it makes up for in simplicity), but the blog’s scan of an In Touch magazine page gives us their true name: Clark Kent glasses. And they’re trendy!
Rockefeller claims he got his name from his godfather, but many assumed that Christian Gerhartsreiter used it because of its implied connection to the blue-blood family. Maybe he just dug the way Superman rocked an alias.

From the Wikipedia entry for Clark Kent:

[T]he personality, concept, and name of Clark Kent have become ingrained in popular culture as well, becoming synonymous with secret identities and innocuous fronts for ulterior motives and activities. . . . Everything about Kent was staged for the benefit of his alternate identity. . . However, in order to draw attention away from the correlation between Kent and Superman, Clark Kent adopted a largely passive and introverted personality, applying conservative mannerisms, a higher-pitched voice, and a slight slouch. This personality is typically described as “mild-mannered[.]”

It’s like he was warning people that he wasn’t who he said he was.

Image from NECN.com