好玩的时装秀去哪儿了

Two Books Look Back at Fashion’s Messy Choreography

好玩的时装秀去哪儿了

Fifteen years into the new millennium, fashion shows tend to be crisply executed mass-marketed affairs, with invitations beamed to electronic calendars, and the events themselves often occurring in black or white boxes and streamed live on iThings from Peoria to St. Petersburg.

在新千年的第15个年头里，时装秀似乎变成了干脆利索的大众市场推广事件，邀请函在电子日程表上闪耀，活动不是在纯黑就是在纯白的空间里举行，不管是在皮奥里亚还是圣彼得堡，都有各种各样的网络视频直播。

Where is the romance? Where is the drama? Where is the stink?

浪漫呢?戏剧性呢?讨厌的事情呢?它们都去了哪里?

Let’s go back to the mid-1980s, when, as the former Newsweek correspondent Dana Thomas reminds us, a model punctuated her prance down John Galliano’s runway by flinging dead mackerels into the audience (one landed in the lap of Joan Burstein, founder of the London boutique Browns).

让我们回想一下20世纪80年代中期，《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)前记者达娜·托马斯(Dana Thomas)讲过，那时候，在约翰·加利亚诺(John Galliano)的秀台上，一位模特一边走，一边往观众席扔死鲭鱼(其中一只落到了伦敦时装精品店布朗斯[Browns]的创始人珍妮·伯斯坦 [Joan Burstein]的大腿上)。

Or just to the 1990s, when Alexander McQueen staged his first women’s wear show for Givenchy in, Ms. Thomas writes, “an old horse slaughterhouse on the edge of Paris, where cobblestone floors slanted toward drains for the flow of animal blood.”

托马斯还说，20世纪90年代初，亚历山大·麦昆(Alexander McQueen)在“巴黎市郊的一个旧马类屠宰场”举办他在纪梵希(Givenchy)的第一场女装秀，“那里的鹅卵石地板都是倾斜的，通向排放动物血水的下水道”。

One would not have been surprised to find McQueen poised at those drains with a collection bucket: He bragged of sewing his own pubic hair into the queen’s soldiers’ hats, embalmed a bunch of worms into a transparent corset and ordered up a hat made of a freshly harvested rack of sheep horns. Talk about Rag & Bone!

就算麦昆手提血水收集桶站在下水道边，人们也不会感到吃惊，因为他夸口说把自己的阴毛缝进了女王士兵式的帽子;把一堆做过防腐处理的虫子放进透明紧身胸衣;订做了一顶用新割下来的大绵羊角做成的帽子。这不是“Rag & Bone”吗!

Building on the extensive reportage of her well-received 2007 book, “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Ms. Thomas has produced a slightly seedy-feeling but, yes, addictive biography of two outsize personalities who seem less the gods or kings of her title than Captain Hook and Peter Pan. Both men have (or had) inconsistent personal hygiene, volatile temperaments and a powerful tendency toward substance abuse.

托马斯女士以自己2007年广受好评的《奢侈品是如何失去光彩的》(Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster)一书中大量报道为基础，撰写了这两位超级大咖的传记。这本书写得稍稍有点乱，不过读起来却让人欲罢不能。他们两个不太像书名中的“神祇与国王”，倒像是钩子船长(Captain Hook)和彼得·潘(Peter Pan)。两人都不怎么讲究个人卫生，性情多变，经常滥用药物。

The cunning and pirate-like Mr. Galliano’s long-suffering Wendy was Amanda Harlech, now more salubriously associated with Karl Lagerfeld; the boyish and brilliant McQueen’s was Isabella Blow, who ended her life in 2007 with weed killer (he followed suit almost three years later, using a favorite belt to hang himself).

狡猾的加利亚诺有着海盗般的模样，阿曼达·哈莱克(Amanda Harlech)则像是他备受痛苦的温蒂(童话《彼得·潘》中的人物——译注)。如今她的名字更多与卡尔·拉格菲尔德(Karl Lagerfeld)联系在一起，这样似乎对她更有利。麦昆的“温蒂”则是伊莎贝拉·布洛(Isabella Blow)，她有点男孩子气，非常聪明，2007年她服用除草剂自杀(差不多三年后他也步上后尘，用自己很喜欢的一根腰带自缢身亡)。

His former assistant Sarah Burton has successfully carried on at his namesake label, and the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of his work, “Savage Beauty,” was one of its most popular ever. (It will open at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Saturday. )

麦昆的前助理莎拉·伯顿(Sarah Burton)继续成功经营他的同名品牌。大都会博物馆的麦昆作品展“野性之美”(Savage Beauty)是该博物馆史上最受欢迎的展览之一(本周六，该展览将在维多利亚和阿尔伯特博物馆[Victoria and Albert Museum]开幕)。

With its subjugation to the market’s whims, though, fashion is a dubious means of achieving immortality, or more than what Ms. Thomas calls “a long fabulous moment — a magical moment.”

不过，时装易受市场潮流的影响，很难获得永恒，不是托马斯所说的“长久迷人的时刻——魔法般的时刻”。

Disgraced after an anti-Semitic rant at a bar in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, Mr. Galliano was fired from Dior and is trying to make a comeback at Maison Margiela, while his own house is maintained by Bill Gaytten (only the most devoted fan of the business could keep all this straight).

加利亚诺曾在巴黎玛莱区的一个酒吧里发表反犹太言论，被迪奥(Dior)解雇，目前正想通过马吉拉时装屋(Maison Margiela)回归时尚界，他自己的时装公司由比尔·盖登(Bill Gaytten)打理(只有该行业最热心的粉丝才能弄明白这一切)。

And in Ms. Thomas’s telling, this business seems generally ruthless, possibly soulless (her body count mounts), giving fragile talents an express ride to rock bottom, if not hell, with its grinding demands for the new.

按照托马斯的说法，这个行业总的来说似乎很无情(她列举了大量被淘汰者)，对新人极为苛刻，能把性格脆弱的人才飞速打入谷底，甚至地狱。

But there are some dazzling pyrotechnics along the way. She describes dozens of shows, each more outrageous than the last: burning cars, tooting trains, models wading or harnessed or temporarily blinded.

不过书中也提到了一些耀眼的盛大场面。作者描述了几十场时装秀，一场比一场令人震惊：燃烧的汽车;拉响汽笛的火车;模特们涉水而过，穿着盔甲，或者被暂时蒙上眼睛。

Robin Givhan has centered her first book on the preparation for and realization of a single “magical moment,” still further back, when a group of five American and five French designers faced off in a lavish and unlikely fund-raising pageant at Versailles on Nov. 28, 1973, abetted by, among others, Liza Minnelli.

罗宾·吉夫汉(Robin Givhan)的第一本书着重讲述了一个“神奇时刻”的准备和实现过程。这也是一件发生在很久以前的事：1973年11月28日，五名美国设计师和五名法国设计师在凡尔赛一场不可思议的豪华筹款盛会上一决高下。挑起对决的人里就有著名的莉莎·明内利(Liza Minnelli)。

This was a decidedly better-scented class of event than the Galliano or McQueen bacchanals, with an ice-cream sculpture in the shape of a porcupine, Kay Thompson instructing the models to “walk like praying mantises” and “jewels on top of jewels, tiaras on top of tiaras,” recalls Donna Karan (then working for Anne Klein, shoved in the basement by the French because they scorned her sportswear with vanity sizing).

与加利亚诺或麦昆的饮酒狂欢相比，这场活动显然更有格调。唐娜·卡兰(Donna Karan)当时为安妮·克莱恩(Anne Klein)工作，她被法国人挤到了地下室，因为他们嘲笑她宽松的休闲服，她回忆说，活动上有豪猪形状的冰激凌雕塑、“一堆堆珠宝和皇冠”，凯·汤普森 (Kay Thompson)指导模特们“像螳螂那样走秀”。

And a less fraught one as well: for fashion was then a “happyland, a snow globe of joy,” Ms. Givhan writes, “an antidote to a toxic world” confronting political unrest and urban sprawl.

而且这场活动也不会那么令人焦虑：吉夫汉写道，当时的时装界“是一片乐土，是充满欢乐的雪花玻璃球”，是“这个有毒世界的解毒剂”，可以对抗政治动乱和城市扩张。

Compared with the tragic opera of Galliano and McQueen, her subject is more a divertissement. But the author argues forcefully that it was a revolutionary one, for the platform it gave to black models, hitherto and since frequently marginalized or excluded, and to the underrecognized designer Stephen Burrows, the gifted creator of the “lettuce edge” technique who she declares was “in modern terms, Alexander Wang, Hedi Slimane and Nicolas Ghesquière all rolled into one.”

与加利亚诺和麦昆的悲剧故事相比，吉夫汉的主题更具娱乐性。不过，作者有力地指出，这场活动是革命性的，因为它把舞台让给了黑人模特(从那时到现在，黑人模特仍然经常被边缘化或排挤)，以及未受到足够重视的设计师斯蒂芬·伯罗斯(Stephen Burrows)，他是“荷叶边”的天才创造者，吉夫汉说他是“王大仁、艾迪·斯里曼(Hedi Slimane)和尼古拉斯·盖斯奇埃尔(Nicolas Ghesquière)的集合体”。