好玩的時裝秀去哪兒了

Two Books Look Back at Fashion’s Messy Choreography

好玩的時裝秀去哪兒了

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個年頭里，時裝秀似乎變成了干脆利索的大眾市場推廣事件，邀請函在電子日程表上閃耀，活動不是在純黑就是在純白的空間里舉行，不管是在皮奧里亞還是圣彼得堡，都有各種各樣的網(wǎng)絡視頻直播。

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

浪漫呢?戲劇性呢?討厭的事情呢?它們都去了哪里?

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).

讓我們回想一下20世紀80年代中期，《新聞周刊》(Newsweek)前記者達娜·托馬斯(Dana Thomas)講過，那時候，在約翰·加利亞諾(John Galliano)的秀臺上，一位模特一邊走，一邊往觀眾席扔死鯖魚(其中一只落到了倫敦時裝精品店布朗斯[Browns]的創(chuàng)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.”

托馬斯還說，20世紀90年代初，亞歷山大·麥昆(Alexander McQueen)在“巴黎市郊的一個舊馬類屠宰場”舉辦他在紀梵希(Givenchy)的第一場女裝秀，“那里的鵝卵石地板都是傾斜的，通向排放動物血水的下水道”。

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!

就算麥昆手提血水收集桶站在下水道邊，人們也不會感到吃驚，因為他夸口說把自己的陰毛縫進了女王士兵式的帽子;把一堆做過防腐處理的蟲子放進透明緊身胸衣;訂做了一頂用新割下來的大綿羊角做成的帽子。這不是“Rag & Bone”嗎!

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.

托馬斯女士以自己2007年廣受好評的《奢侈品是如何失去光彩的》(Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster)一書中大量報道為基礎，撰寫了這兩位超級大咖的傳記。這本書寫得稍稍有點亂，不過讀起來卻讓人欲罷不能。他們兩個不太像書名中的“神祇與國王”，倒像是鉤子船長(Captain Hook)和彼得·潘(Peter Pan)。兩人都不怎么講究個人衛(wèi)生，性情多變，經(jīng)常濫用藥物。

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).

狡猾的加利亞諾有著海盜般的模樣，阿曼達·哈萊克(Amanda Harlech)則像是他備受痛苦的溫蒂(童話《彼得·潘》中的人物——譯注)。如今她的名字更多與卡爾·拉格菲爾德(Karl Lagerfeld)聯(lián)系在一起，這樣似乎對她更有利。麥昆的“溫蒂”則是伊莎貝拉·布洛(Isabella Blow)，她有點男孩子氣，非常聰明，2007年她服用除草劑自殺(差不多三年后他也步上后塵，用自己很喜歡的一根腰帶自縊身亡)。

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. )

麥昆的前助理莎拉·伯頓(Sarah Burton)繼續(xù)成功經(jīng)營他的同名品牌。大都會博物館的麥昆作品展“野性之美”(Savage Beauty)是該博物館史上最受歡迎的展覽之一(本周六，該展覽將在維多利亞和阿爾伯特博物館[Victoria and Albert Museum]開幕)。

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.”

不過，時裝易受市場潮流的影響，很難獲得永恒，不是托馬斯所說的“長久迷人的時刻——魔法般的時刻”。

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).

加利亞諾曾在巴黎瑪萊區(qū)的一個酒吧里發(fā)表反猶太言論，被迪奧(Dior)解雇，目前正想通過馬吉拉時裝屋(Maison Margiela)回歸時尚界，他自己的時裝公司由比爾·蓋登(Bill Gaytten)打理(只有該行業(yè)最熱心的粉絲才能弄明白這一切)。

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.

按照托馬斯的說法，這個行業(yè)總的來說似乎很無情(她列舉了大量被淘汰者)，對新人極為苛刻，能把性格脆弱的人才飛速打入谷底，甚至地獄。

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.

不過書中也提到了一些耀眼的盛大場面。作者描述了幾十場時裝秀，一場比一場令人震驚：燃燒的汽車;拉響汽笛的火車;模特們涉水而過，穿著盔甲，或者被暫時蒙上眼睛。

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.

羅賓·吉夫漢(Robin Givhan)的第一本書著重講述了一個“神奇時刻”的準備和實現(xiàn)過程。這也是一件發(fā)生在很久以前的事：1973年11月28日，五名美國設計師和五名法國設計師在凡爾賽一場不可思議的豪華籌款盛會上一決高下。挑起對決的人里就有著名的莉莎·明內利(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).

與加利亞諾或麥昆的飲酒狂歡相比，這場活動顯然更有格調。唐娜·卡蘭(Donna Karan)當時為安妮·克萊恩(Anne Klein)工作，她被法國人擠到了地下室，因為他們嘲笑她寬松的休閑服，她回憶說，活動上有豪豬形狀的冰激凌雕塑、“一堆堆珠寶和皇冠”，凱·湯普森 (Kay Thompson)指導模特們“像螳螂那樣走秀”。

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.

而且這場活動也不會那么令人焦慮：吉夫漢寫道，當時的時裝界“是一片樂土，是充滿歡樂的雪花玻璃球”，是“這個有毒世界的解毒劑”，可以對抗政治動亂和城市擴張。

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.”

與加利亞諾和麥昆的悲劇故事相比，吉夫漢的主題更具娛樂性。不過，作者有力地指出，這場活動是革命性的，因為它把舞臺讓給了黑人模特(從那時到現(xiàn)在，黑人模特仍然經(jīng)常被邊緣化或排擠)，以及未受到足夠重視的設計師斯蒂芬·伯羅斯(Stephen Burrows)，他是“荷葉邊”的天才創(chuàng)造者，吉夫漢說他是“王大仁、艾迪·斯里曼(Hedi Slimane)和尼古拉斯·蓋斯奇埃爾(Nicolas Ghesquière)的集合體”。