1.2万英镑的手袋值不值？ A work of art? It’s in the bag

Earlier this year I was out in Hong Kong with two Englishwomen. We saw a handbag in a shop window. The women were moderately tempted. It was priced in Hong Kong dollars. “What’s that in pounds?” we wondered. Eventually we worked it out: ￡12,000. We staggered off, amazed. Later I asked an executive in luxury goods who would buy that handbag. “A secretary,” she replied.

今年早些时候，我在香港与两名英国女子一起逛街。我们在一家商店的橱窗看到一个手袋。那两名女子有些动心。我们想知道这个手袋的港币价格换算成英镑是多少。最终，我们得出了答案：1.2万英镑。这让我们目瞪口呆。后来，我向一位奢侈品行业的高管请教，谁会买这种手袋。她回答道：“秘书。”

That handbag is a key artefact in our current status game. Nobody has understood better than the luxury goods industry how status works today.

在我们当前的地位游戏中，这种手袋是一个关键的手工艺品。没有人比奢侈品行业更清楚如今地位是怎么回事。

Humans seek status, and usually deny they’re seeking it. The best route to status used to be high birth. You were born posh, and then marinaded in posh codes from the nursery. Nancy Mitford, in her essay “The English Aristocracy”, divulged some upper-class speech rules. Crucially, if the topic arose, you had to say “lavatory paper” and not “toilet paper”. “Lavatory paper” was upper-class (or “U”, in Mitford’s code) while “toilet paper” was “non-U”. However, Mitford doubted that “non-U” people could ever become “U”.

人们追逐地位，而且通常还否认自己在追逐地位。过去，获得地位的最佳途径是出身高贵。你出身于上流社会，那么从襁褓起就会浸泡在上流社会的套路中。南希?米特福德(Nancy Mitford)在《英格兰贵族》一文中透露了上流社会的某些说话规则。其中重要的一点是，在相关话题出现的时候，你必须说“卫生纸”(lavatory paper)，而不能说“厕所纸”(toilet paper)。“卫生纸”是上流社会用语（用米特福德的话来说，是“上流”），而“厕所纸“是“非上流”用语。然而，米特福德怀疑“非上流”者能够变成“上流”人士。

But when she wrote this, in 1954, she knew that meritocracy was already changing things. High birth no longer guaranteed status. Status was becoming something you had to acquire. Often people did this by mastering high culture. If you “knew book” (to use the excellent Liberian expression) you had status. But from the 1960s, high culture too began losing status. As pop culture made its own claims, people began to ask why knowing book was better than knowing TV.

但米特福德在1954年写这些话的时候就知道，以任人唯贤为原则的精英制度已经在改变局面。出身高贵不再能保证获得地位。地位成为你必须努力争取的东西。人们往往通过掌握高雅文化来获得地位。如果你“懂书”（借用一个很传神的利比里亚表达方式），你就有地位。但从上世纪60年代起，高雅文化也开始丧失地位。随着通俗文化兴起，人们开始质问：为何“懂书”就比“懂电视”好。

The third main route to status was to buy things you didn’t need. Thorstein Veblen in 1899 called this “conspicuous consumption”. Whereas high-culture people sought status in knowing, conspicuous consumers sought it in having. The “knowing” lot had to mock the “having” lot, because everyone else’s form of status threatens your own. If I know book, then I want status to derive from knowing book. I then have to mock anyone who claims status from anything else.

第三条获得地位的主要途径是购买你不需要的东西。索尔斯坦?维布伦(Thorstein Veblen)在1899年将这称为“炫耀消费”。高雅文化人通过“求知”来寻求地位，而炫耀消费者通过“拥有”来寻求地位。“求知”族必须嘲笑“拥有”族，因为其他人的地位形式威胁到你自己的地位。如果我“懂书”，那么我希望地位源于“懂书”。因此，我必须嘲笑那些宣称地位源于其它东西的人。

But rising incomes changed the status game again. Suddenly new groups could afford things they didn’t need. Clearly their claims to status had to be mocked. And so in pre-recession Britain, working-class people who bought luxury goods got called “chavs”. In China, I’m told, secretaries who buy the same stuff are known as “Madame Bovarys”. The Bovarys are derided for inhabiting a fantasy world of ￡12,000 handbags. Because of these women, conspicuous consumption lost some of its status, just as high birth and high culture had previously.

但收入增长再次改变了地位游戏。突然之间，新的人群买得起自己以前不需要的商品了。显然，这些人对地位的追求必须受到嘲笑。于是，在陷入衰退之前的英国，购买奢侈品的工人阶级被称为“俗人”（chavs，指那些没有多少钱，品味也不高却热衷名牌的人）。我被告知，在中国，购买同样东西的秘书们被称为“包法利夫人”。“包法利夫人们”因生活在一个1.2万英镑的手袋的虚幻世界里而遭到嘲笑。由于这些女人的存在，炫耀消费失去了某些地位，正如早先的高贵出身和高雅文化一样。

Simply “having” luxury goods is no longer enough. Other conspicuous consumers, anxious to prove they aren’t “chavs” or “Bovarys”, now try to “know” the goods too. “The whole game now is to be a connoisseur,” the executive in the luxury goods industry told me. A Bovary merely buys the handbag. A more ambitious status-seeker visits the Parisian atelier where the handbag is made, watches the workman finish the handbag on the spot and gets told a story about how the company has made handbags for posh Europeans forever. What was once a handbag is now sold as a work of craftsmanship, or even art. After all, nobody can say for certain any more that handbags aren’t art.

仅仅“拥有”奢侈品不再足以证明有地位。其他炫耀消费者迫切希望证明自己不是“俗人”或“包法利夫人”，他们现在也在努力“懂得”商品。那位奢侈品行业的高管告诉我，“目前的游戏目的是成为鉴赏家”。“包法利夫人”只会购买手袋。更具雄心的地位寻求者则前往法国探访制造手袋的作坊，现场观看工匠制作手袋的过程，并倾听该公司如何为欧洲上流社会长期制作手袋的故事。曾经的手袋目前被作为工艺品、甚至是艺术品销售。毕竟，现在没有人敢言之凿凿地说手袋不是艺术品。

Luxury goods companies now wrap themselves in the language of high art. They call themselves “cultural and creative industries”. Louis Vuitton pays artists such as Takashi Murakami and Olafur Eliasson to design its products and shop windows. And the guardians of high culture increasingly accept luxury goods as art: the Met in New York gave the fashion designer Alexander McQueen a fantastically popular posthumous exhibition.

奢侈品公司目前用高雅艺术的语言包装自己。他们自称为“文化和创意行业”。路易威登(Louis Vuitton)聘请村上隆(Takashi Murakami)和奥拉维尔?埃利亚松(Olafur Eliasson)等艺术家设计产品和橱窗。与此同时，高雅文化的守护者们越来越接受奢侈品是艺术的观点：纽约大都会艺术博物馆(Metropolitan Museum of Art)为已故时装设计师亚历山大?麦奎因(Alexander McQueen)举办了一场展览，结果大受欢迎。

But that ￡12,000 handbag, as well as being art, and being expensive, has a third trait too: a whiff of poshness. Luxury brands are forever trying to anchor themselves in the prewar European aristocracy.

但那个1.2万英镑的手袋除了既是艺术品又非常昂贵外，还有第三个特征：有些高贵的气息。奢侈品牌永远试图将自己与战前的欧洲贵族联系在一起。

I saw this recently when (strictly for research purposes) I visited Louis Vuitton’s flagship store in Paris. About half the customers were Chinese. (Here is the only plausible economic future for France, Italy and Britain: flogging our posh prewar past to non-Europeans.) From a wall beside the store’s entrance hung old monogrammed trunks of the sort that prewar aristos such as Nancy Mitford used to travel.

我在最近访问路易威登巴黎旗舰店时（纯粹出于研究目的）看到了这一点。大约一半的顾客是中国人（这便是法国、意大利和英国唯一貌似有出路的经济未来：向非欧洲人兜售欧洲在战前的高贵）。在商店门口旁边的墙上，悬挂着南希?米特福德等战前贵族们过去旅行时携带的那种旧的品牌行李箱。

On a shelf stood a book called 100 Legendary Trunks, open at a page marked, “Artists and Scholars”. I became probably the first person ever to read the quote on the page. “What is interesting about the imagination,” wrote someone called Anne Baratin, “is that one never knows to what country it will take us. We packed our trunks to go north, we left for lunch.” I smirked at the ludicrousness. Of course I did: intellectual snobbery is my only claim to status.

一个架子上放着一本名为《100个传奇行李箱》(100 Legendary Trunks)的书籍，打开的一页上写着“艺术家和学者”。我可能是第一个阅读这页上援引的高论的人。一个叫作安妮?巴拉廷(Anne Baratin)的人写到：“想象力的有趣之处在于，我们从不知道它会把我们带到哪个国家。我们收拾行李向北走，我们去吃午饭。”这种胡说八道让我得意地发笑。我当然会笑：我自认为在学识上高人一筹，这是我唯一可以宣称有地位的途径。

Still, the luxury goods industry is clearly cleverer than I am. The store (or “maison”, as the industry likes to call it) screamed out a new symphony of the three main forms of status.

话说回来，奢侈品行业显然比我更聪明。那家商店（奢侈品行业喜欢称为“品牌屋”）把获得地位的三条主要途径重新组合在一起，谱写出一曲新的交响乐。

High birth, art and conspicuous consumption have now merged into one handbag. That’s why it costs ￡12,000.

出身高贵、艺术和炫耀消费如今已融会于一只手袋，这就是它标价1.2万英镑的原因。