pushing fashion boundaries in an era without any

這是一篇寫得很好的文章，無論你的工作／興趣跟時裝是否有關，也值得讀讀。由於害怕你看見一大堆英語會放棄，我將重點翻譯了，希望原作者不介意。

近年，時裝工業愛用「性別轉移、人體整型、性別對調、雌雄同體」有關的題材，作者cathy horyn認為，這些多年來重複又重複使用的話題，根本是無計可施之下策。既然現在的科技使人可以任意重新塑造自己的軀體，資訊流動速度驚人，世界有這麼多重塑性別和肉體的選擇，在這個沒有什麼界線好推前的時代，時裝還有什麼前瞻性可言？作者認為，用著「性」作為賣點，因為「此刻時裝根本沒什麼重要的話好說」。

變性模特Lea T出現於Givenchy廣告
Three times this week I’ve heard someone refer to “a parallel world.” The first was on Sunday, when the wife of a college friend said that she did not pay much attention to the celebrity-media culture. My friend, a real estate investor, and his wife, a doctor, had left Manhattan for Darien, Conn., shortly after 9/11 and were raising two girls in a neighborhood of two-story Colonials and adjoining lawns. I had the distinct sense that she did not mind not knowing who Snooki was (nor did her husband or their elder child, a polite and articulate eighth grader with braids), but also that at one time she did not feel quite so separated from mass culture.

“I feel like I’m living in a parallel world,” she said.

On Monday morning, on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” I heard Mike Barnicle make a similar comment, although in the context of the Tucson shootings. The next day, I happened to be speaking to Barbara Vinken, a professor of French literature at the University of Munich and the author of “Fashion Zeitgeist,” when she referred to the Internet not merely as a parallel universe of self-created identities and opportunities, but as “a dark continent,” a place where people “more and more live rather than in the real world.”

This is not a coincidence. Feeling that you are on multiple channels, and not understanding anything clearly, seems to be a condition of modern life, and each of us deals with it differently. My friends do not let their daughters watch television; they just think it is a time-waster and a brain drain. Guarding their creative powers in a world flooded with images and other content, much of it mediocre, is also a concern among up-and-coming fashion photographers like Danko Steiner and Daniel Sannwald, who already deal with timid magazine editors and the perception that, for now, fashion has nothing significant to say.

Few people spend more time looking at fashion images than Pascal Dangin, the founder of Box Studios, who retouches the work of photographers like Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, as well the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Allure, and he says, “We live in a rather dull moment in fashion.”

You can maybe understand, then, why designers and photographers want to perk things up with sex. Sexuality and gender crossovers are always a place to go, like a “Renaissance curiosity cabinet,” as Professor Vinken put it, but especially now that the industry has become slushy with products, and luxury has lost some of its allure. And, as Mr. Dangin said, “We still have some big taboos about sex.”

Last year, Givenchy arguably got as much attention for using Lea T, a transsexual model, in its advertisements as it did for Riccardo Tisci’s collections. Ms. T, a friend of the designer’s for years and a fit model for the house, appeared in fall ads. For his spring 2011 show, Raf Simons used Andrej Pejic, a model with long blond hair and girlish features, because, as Mr. Simons said, his collection of zippered cotton tunics and wide trousers dealt in part with the subject of transgender. “It’s become a natural thing for people to change their bodies,” he said.

男模 Andrej Pejic 為 Marc by Marc Jacobs 拍攝廣告
Next month, Mr. Pejic will appear in ads for Marc by Marc Jacobs, photographed by Juergen Teller. Mr. Meisel, who has used androgynous models at different periods of his career, took that approach with Balenciaga’s spring campaign. Following on the Lea T ads, Mr. Tisci hired Stephen Thompson, who has albinism.

白化症患者Stephen Thompson 出現於 Givenchy 廣告
This week, preparing for his Thierry Mugler debut on Jan. 19 at the Paris men’s shows, Nicola Formichetti was in Montreal photographing a young man named Rick Genest, whom he found on Facebook and is known as Rico. Mr. Genest had his body tattooed to resemble a skeleton, with blackened eye sockets and ghoulishly large dentiture on his lips. “Rico is my muse,” Mr. Formichetti, who styles Lady Gaga, wrote in an e-mail.

紋身模特 Rick Genest
Of course, in fashion, things can always get stranger, but they rarely do anymore. Nudity, androgyny, sado-masochistic fantasies, an overtly gay sensibility — all these ideas have been expressed for years. It is hard to look at a collection by Rick Owens, one of the few designers who manages to be both avant-garde and commercial, without seeing androgynous models, and he also once hired a person with albinism.

For Mr. Tisci’s generation, these ideas might be interesting to explore in a new context, and with greater acceptance. But more often than not, the decisions seem arbitrary, amounting to dissidence on the consumer level — something that Susan Sontag and other cultural critics complained about in the 1990s. “It’s just manipulation to get you to the next thing,” said Klaus Stockhausen, the fashion director of German GQ.

As Mr. Dangin said, though, it is easy to see why sexuality is such a hot button. Things are a bit frozen. Many of the designers who could truly communicate ideas — Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen — are gone from the scene. The London-based Mr. Sannwald, whose slightly futuristic photographs are inspired in part by the work of Fritz Lang and other early German filmmakers, recalled being told by an editor of a British magazine that his images were too extreme. He quickly countered by producing some very old issues of Vogue, but those pictures were deemed too risky to use today.

“It was unbelievable,” Mr. Sannwald said. “Everybody is concerned about pleasing the advertisers, and it’s not just the big magazines.”

Like Mr. Steiner, who was the design director of Vogue before he became a full-time photographer, Mr. Sannwald tries to ignore what the mainstream magazines have determined is interesting. Mr. Steiner, whose arresting images appear in the Berlin-based magazine 032c, said, “I’ve always believed that there’s a guiding parameter to photographs, and that’s quality,” adding, “I don’t think commercial is a bad word. Independent magazines can be just as horribly trashy as the others.”

In some ways, the focus on sexuality reflects the fairly narrow thinking of designers and photographers (or, possibly, of editors and advertising agency art directors). After all, the Internet offers people all kinds of ways to express themselves — through blogs, e-commerce, photographs and videos. To be sure, some of it is not worthwhile, but the Internet represents a world that is livelier, more daring and actual than what currently takes place on runways and in mainstream magazines.

One direction suggested by the Internet is the return of individual creative power. As Professor Vinken said, if people can surgically manipulate their bodies, or virtually turn their bodies inside out with tattoos, “you have to wonder what the function of fashion still is?” These ideas, along with technological influences like the shape of carbon-fiber automobiles, are far more potent than another gender-bender.

Phillip Toledano 所拍攝有關於整型手術之相片
The photographer Phillip Toledano thinks so, too. He did a series of portraits of people who had undergone fairly radical cosmetic surgery. One man told him he wanted to look like an animated character. “I think the good thing about technology is that it’s going to widen the definition of beauty,” Mr. Toledano said. “It’s pretty narrow now, and also quite modish.” Maybe by the time his infant daughter is a teenager, he mused, she will be able to take a pill and have blue skin. “Because that will be the fashion for a week or two.”

written by cathy horyn
original article: nytimes.com