Forget Greenland. Macron’s sunglasses take over Davos.

Was Macron evoking Tom Cruise’s cocky fighter pilot Maverick in “Top Gun," signaling that he wouldn’t back down against Trump’s demands for control of Greenland? Others thought he might be throwing shade by wearing aviator-style sunglasses favored by former President Biden, the object of Trump’s constant derision.

Some saw even bigger stakes: “Can Macron’s sunglasses save the West?" read a headline in the Telegraph, the conservative British newspaper.

Macron in fact intended none of those things, French officials said. The sunglasses were meant to hide a burst blood vessel in his eye.

Nevertheless, photographs of Macron wearing the shades made the front pages of newspapers around the world. The blue-tinted lenses seemed to resonate perfectly with the cobalt blue background of the Davos stage, creating a striking effect. Shares of the Italian company that owns the sunglasses brand jumped on the Milan stock exchange.

Memes proliferated across the internet, fueled by generative AI. Macron was shown as a fighter pilot, flashing the middle finger as he tracked Trump in Air Force One to the “Top Gun" theme song. He was Sylvester Stallone in the 1986 action movie “Cobra," toting a machine gun.

The French president’s sunglasses served as a piece of unintentional political theater for a continent looking for more toughness from its leaders, analysts said. Sunglasses worn indoors are more often an accessory of dictators—Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe—than democratically elected leaders of Western nations.

The sunglasses seemed to lend Macron the swagger that Trump tends to respect.

Trump noticed.

“I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses. What the hell happened?" Trump said on Wednesday at Davos. “But I watched him, sort of, be tough."

During his speech that afternoon, Trump said he wouldn’t use military force to take Greenland; later in the day, U.S. officials backed off a threat to impose additional tariffs on European nations.

Macron’s shades may have had little to do with the shift, but it’s still clear they are among the most consequential pieces of political eyewear since the Republican convention of 2008, when Sarah Palin’s rimless glasses spurred a run on the model in opticians across the U.S.

His sunglasses came from Henry Jullien, a small French brand based in the foothills of the Jura Mountains near Switzerland that was on the brink of collapse a few years ago. The company was bankrupt when the Italian eyewear company iVision Tech bought it in 2023 after being solicited by the French authorities, who were seeking to save a few jobs.

Then in 2024, one of Macron’s assistants reached out to the brand saying the president wanted to buy sunglasses that were 100% made-in-France.

“I said, ‘Is it the president or is it spam?’" said Stefano Fulchir, iVision’s chief executive.

iVision selected a model made with laminated gold and blue-tinted lenses—costing more than $700—that offered high protection from the camera flashes that typically bombard the president’s eyes.

Commentators gave him credit for handling an eye ailment with more panache than former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who wore an eye-patch in 2023 after injuring himself jogging.

“Here we can see the difference between a German and a Frenchman solving the same problem," said one.

Macron began his speech by taking a swipe at Trump’s claim to have ended eight wars while in office. The French president noted there were more than 60 wars in 2024—“an absolute record, even if I understood a few of them were fixed."

But then, with his glasses shimmering under the camera lights, the president didn’t play Le Maverick. Instead, he made the case for Europe’s core values.

“We have a place where rule of law and predictability is still the rule of the game," he said. “And my guess is that it is largely underpriced by the market."

Write to Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com