Worrying news from New York - is there any other kind?

- suggests the monocle may soon be nestling between "manbag" and "moustache" on the checklist of must-have male fashion accessories. God help us all. Or those of us who don't want to look like Chris Eubank, Erich von Stroheim or the Penguin, anyway. Which is most of us. Or should be.

There's a (very short) list of culprits, the first of whom is our own Alan Cumming. He has been photographed wearing a purple-tinted monocle and looking every-so-slightly like Quentin Crisp for the cover of this month's Spirit And Flesh magazine. No, I've never heard of it either.

Joining Cumming in the monocle club is a Miami-based rapper called Jose Vega. "I got it just to have my own style, bring something new to the table," Vega tells the New York Times, the paper which first floated the idea that monocles might be having a fashion moment (or, more likely, which put one and one together and decided two's a trend). So far, so gangsta. But then Vega adds, somewhat disarmingly: "Also, I'm nearsighted."

The paper also quotes a trend forecaster who says people have been spotted wearing monocles in Berlin, Cape Town and, that noted hotbed of fashion experimentation, south Dublin. And it finds a San Francisco-based manufacturer of monocles who says its sales are up. A bit, anyway.

Good fun, of course, but isn't it a little thin to hang a fashion revolution on? New York-based online magazine Salon certainly thinks so and has issued a riposte to the paper under the headline: "Stop trying to make monocles happen." Falling into line behind Salon is an army of fashion bloggers saying pretty much the same thing, only with fewer words and more pictures of Mr Peanut, a cartoon figure which means very little to us but which in America is widely recognised as the mascot of food company Planters. So it's bit like the Robertson's golliwog, only without the racist overtones.

Mind you, the monocle isn't without its own unfortunate associations. Leaving aside the fact that William Hartnell wore one in Doctor Who, it's generally only been favoured by toffs, Nazis - both real and Hollywod versions - and upper-class eccentrics such as Sir Patrick Moore and Lord Peter Wimsey. Which is why if you tried one on you just know the first words out of your mouth would be either "Haw haw haw", "Vee haf vays of making you talk", or "I can see Uranus".

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: who is going to wear one? Nobody, you would hope. As I squint into the future through two lenses in a black plastic frame, I confess I don't see Scotland's pubs, clubs, coffee shops and student unions being overrun by monocle-wearing hipsters. But the very fact the monocle has even been suggested as a possible style accessory means that someone, somewhere is going to be daft enough to try. Haw haw …