2024年06月四级第3套仔细阅读 Passage 1 原文翻译及答案解析

It may sound surprising, but you don't have to be interested in fashion, or even in history, to enjoy Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. I happen to be interested in both, and ended up enjoying the book for completely different reasons.

听起来可能令人惊讶，但你不必对时尚甚至历史感兴趣，就能享受《着装规范：时尚法则如何塑造历史》这本书。我恰好对两者都感兴趣，但最终因为完全不同的原因喜欢上了这本书。

Richard Thompson Ford is a law professor, and you probably won't forget that for even one page. His carefully reasoned arguments, packed with examples, sound almost like reading a court opinion, only maybe wordier. You will probably never think of fashion as a trifle again.

Richard Thompson Ford是一位法学教授，你可能一页都不会忘记这一点。他精心论证的论点，充满了例子，听起来几乎像在阅读法庭意见书，只是可能更冗长。你可能再也不会把时尚看作微不足道的小事了。

Ford's thesis is that the best way to understand what particular fashions meant in any given era is to look at the restrictions placed on them. Through this lens, he shows us that the first laws passed in the 1200s to ensure that only the nobility were allowed to wear certain fabrics, colors and ornaments reflected the rise of the middle class, who were now able to imitate some of these fashions. The status of the upper classes was threatened; fashion was a tool to preserve it.

Ford的论点是，理解任何特定时代特定时尚含义的最佳方式是审视对它们施加的限制。通过这一视角，他向我们展示，13世纪通过的首批法律确保只有贵族被允许穿着某些面料、颜色和饰品，这反映了中产阶级的崛起，因为他们现在能够模仿这些时尚。上层阶级的地位受到威胁；时尚是维护地位的工具。

Ford takes the reader through the evolution of fashion while examining the underlying motivations of status, sex, power, and personality, which, he assumes, influenced all innovations in fashion in the past and which continue to influence us today. His writing is more than a little dense—dense with research, clauses, and precise adjectives and nouns. But there's also humor and enough interesting episodes to make the writing appealing. No one is spared his sharp analysis: not the easy targets of 19th century women's crippling (伤害身体的) fashions nor the modern uniforms of Silicon Valley T-shirts.

Ford带领读者回顾时尚的演变，同时审视地位、性、权力和个性这些潜在动机，他认为这些动机影响了过去所有时尚创新，并继续影响着我们今天。他的写作非常密集——充满了研究、从句以及精确的形容词和名词。但其中也有幽默和足够有趣的轶事，使写作引人入胜。没有人能逃过他的尖锐分析：无论是19世纪女性伤害身体的时尚这种容易攻击的目标，还是硅谷T恤这种现代制服。

But the greatest strength of this book (on fashion!) is its intellectual profoundness. Ford asks us to question unconscious beliefs, to realize that we almost never do so, to understand that the simplest choices are charged with meaning, and yet that meaning can and does change all the time. Consider the fact that a 1918 catalog insisted that boys and girls be dressed in the appropriate color. We believe our thinking today is evolved; Ford shows us it's not.

但这本书（关于时尚！）最大的优点是其思想深度。Ford要求我们质疑无意识的信念，意识到我们几乎从不这样做，理解最简单的选择都充满意义，而这种意义可以而且确实在不断变化。考虑一下这个事实：1918年的一份目录坚持认为男孩和女孩应穿着适当的颜色。我们认为我们今天的思想是进步的；Ford向我们展示并非如此。