8 Famous Celebrity Looks (That Were Stupid Accidents)

Like Bono, Depp actually has to wear his dumb sunglasses for medical reasons. Some poor team of opticians has been crafting dozens of blue sunglasses to correct his combination of near- and farsightedness. But only for his right eye. His left one has been pretty much a lost cause since birth. It's not completely blind, but it makes everything look basically like a Monet painting after someone put it in a dishwasher. So unless he's playing a role that requires sunglasses, like in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, he's acting while being aware only of what's going on a few inches directly in front of his face.

But that doesn't explain wanting to see the world like an underwater wonderland? (Actually, we answered our own question there). There's no solid confirmation, but there is a perceptual processing disorder called "Meares-Irlen syndrome," for which ophthalmologists prescribe such hipster-friendly shades, which can reduce stress to the eye from overstimulation. And if busy patterns and shocking color palettes are the cause of his woes, it makes us wonder why he keeps dressing like was dragged through a Goodwill at high speed. Then again, the poor guy probably hasn't been able to look at himself in the mirror for decades.

Sometime in the '80s, after a visit to Sony headquarters in Japan, Jobs was mightily impressed with how all the employees were wearing the same corporate garb. So when he returned home, he set a plan in motion to have all Apple employees dress alike, like some sort of hi-tech Catholic school. First he hired the designer behind the Sony uniforms, Issey Miyake, to create a snazzy vest. But when he then showcased his idea of dressing the smartest people in Silicon Valley like they were working in an off-brand TGI Fridays, it was not a hit. Jobs later recalled: "Oh man, did I get booed off the stage. Everybody hated the idea." It was the sartorial equivalent of the Apple Lisa.

Only mildly deterred, Jobs took matters into his own hands and had Miyake base another uniform on the black turtlenecks he liked wearing. And like with the vests, everyone fucking hated them. So now he was stuck with boxes and boxes of the things. But ever one to turn lemons into marginally nutritious smoothies, Jobs saw a silver lining in the debacle: "I have enough to last for the rest of my life." And he did.

You might suppose it was carefully calculated, in the way that backwards jeans and genie pants were conscious though ill-advised attempts by hip-hop artists to stand out from the pack. Or maybe the clock was a modern, symbolic homage to the albatross from "The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner." Yeah, probably not that one. According to Flav, the real reason he wound up running around with an oversized timepiece like he was late for a meeting with the Queen of Hearts was much simpler: He did it on a dare.

Describing the clock's origin in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Flav said, "Someone in my crew put a shower clock around my neck and dared me to keep it on during our show. I thought the look of the clock around my neck was dope, so I kept it on." We should all feel lucky no one dared Flav to also wear the shower hose as a feather boa. Of course, that meant that his early clocks didn't have any nifty logos or designs or anything like that, but were the sort you might find in the toiletries aisle at Sears circa 1982.

Foley did not then turn to an S&M-certified leather worker to craft him a strap-on harness for his face, but simply rummaged around in the (what has to be spectacularly odd) repository where the WWE keeps its unused props. Ironically, the leather straps were originally designed for Mankind's greatest adversary, the Undertaker, but McMahon, again displaying his flair for micromanagement, decided it didn't quite fit with his patented "Western mortician" motif. Thus the mask was repurposed, and the delicate sensibilities of professional wrestling fans were spared the nightmarish sight of Mick Foley's gaping eldritch horror of a face.

How I Won The War was a dark antiwar comedy that came out in 1967, and you can be excused for not seeing it, because it sucked. In it, Lennon, who was surely hired for his acting ability and not because he was more famous than Jesus, played "Musketeer Gripweed," a "schoolboyish and reticent wimp." Lennon's main job was to deliver painfully unfunny one-liners, like replying "No, I play harmonica" to the question of whether he was married.

The glasses were a deliberate part of the wardrobe, designed to "emphasize the character's comicality, vulnerability, innocence and hints of sexual ambivalence" -- which is a lot of range to demand from a pair of glasses. But Lennon liked them so much that he decided to keep wearing them, and even incorporated them into his public persona. The army regulation haircut? Not so much. Of course, due to the simple fact that a Beatle wore them on a movie poster, they never went out of style again. Even today, one can readily acquire a similar pair from "vintage" retailers, which don't mind charging you a fortune for something that was originally intended to make the wearer look like a cowardly idiot.

As a kid, Van Zandt got into an accident that saw him flying through the windshield of a car. His injuries weren't life-threatening, but his hair never grew back in what he considered a socially acceptable manner. "I decided that I didn't want to deal with wigs and things, so I just stumbled onto my thing." After experimenting with various unfortunate hats, he settled on a style that's usually only kosher in biker bars (for people with Dutch surnames who pretend to be Italian).

But how about his luscious greaser mane in The Sopranos? That was a wig, which he is forced to wear for acting gigs, as Hollywood is still too bigoted to give roles to people who identify as Zorro. He often jokes that "half of the acting I do is actually done by the hair." But don't expect Van Zandt to ever go the John Travolta route and glue a hairpiece to his noggin. He'll be rolling those bandanas all the way to the nursing home.

So were they saving money by letting one of their dementia-stricken grandmothers sew together these monstrosities? Were they forming a cult to worship the god of velour? In truth, they knew full well that they looked like idiots. And the flamboyantly repugnant outfits served a very practical purpose: It saved them a bundle on taxes.

Early in their career, ABBA was made aware of a weird Swedish law, whereby they could completely write off all wardrobe costs as a tax deduction as long as said outfits were "so outrageous that they couldn't be worn on the street." In an official ABBA biography, Bjorn Ulvaeus (the first "B") revealed how self-aware they were: "In my honest opinion we looked like nuts in those years. Nobody can have been as badly dressed on stage as we were."

It seems that ABBA missed their calling in tax law, because in 2007, Ulvaeus was again able to fend off the Swedish government, which this time was suing him for millions over tax evasion. Not only did Ulvaeus manage to beat the charges, but he also got to keep every krona of his royalties. We wonder what outfit he wore to court to make that happen.

E. Reid Ross is the author of "Nature Is The Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want To Go Outside Again," which is in stores now and available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For more accidents that led to lasting fame, check out 7 Celebrity Careers That Launched by Accident and 5 Dumb Accidents That Made 'Star Wars' A Classic.

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