为什么商界精英又开始留大胡子

THESE are dark days for the shaving industry. After experiencing a century of fairly steady growth, makers of razors and other shaving equipment have seen revenues level off or fall in the last few years. Beards are back.

剃须业光景惨淡。经历一个世纪颇为稳定的增长后，剃刀等剃须设备的生产商，在过去几年里收入一直持平甚至下降。络腮胡又回来了。

One striking feature of this resurgence is that for the first time in well over a century, a growing number of the world’s business leaders are sporting facial hair. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Salesforce, are just a few prominent examples.

这股复兴的潮流中，最惊人的一点是越来越多的商界领袖正在蓄起胡须，这是百年来的头一遭。谷歌(Google)联合创始人谢尔盖·布林(Sergey Brin)、高盛首席执行官劳尔德·C·贝兰克梵(Lloyd kfein)、Salesforce创始人兼首席执行官、亿万富翁马克·贝尼奥夫(Marc Benioff)，只是其中几个显眼的例子。

It’s easy to view the bearded business leader as a mere extension of the overall beard trend, or yet another sign that work environments are becoming more casual. But the tangled history of facial hair and capitalism suggests that deeper forces are at work.

我们大可以把满面胡须的商界领袖简单地看做络腮胡潮流的一种延伸，或是职场环境正在变得更随意的又一个例证。然而透过胡须和资本主义的历史纠缠，可以看出其中有更深层次的力量在起作用。

Historically, beards in the boardroom have been a barometer of the relative vitality of capitalism and its critics. When capitalism has assumed a more swashbuckling, individualistic persona, hair has sprouted on the chins of entrepreneurs and speculators. But when forces bent on destroying capitalism have been ascendant — or when well-regulated, faceless corporations have defined economic life — beards have waned.

董事会上的络腮胡，在历史上一直是资本主义与其批判者的势力对比晴雨表。当资本主义在扮演一种更具个人色彩的豪客角色时，企业家和投机者的面颊就会繁茂起来。当致力于摧毁资本主义的力量占据优势——或者在受到充分监管的，没有面孔的大企业充当经济生活的主角时——络腮胡消身匿迹。

For most of the modern era, beards and mustaches grew only at the margins of society. In the United States, the founding fathers eschewed facial hair. The same cleanshaven look prevailed throughout Europe among the capitalist classes.

在近现代的多数时间里，络腮胡和小胡子只存活在社会的边缘。在美国，开国元勋们放弃了胡须。光洁的面孔在欧洲各国的资产阶级中也蔚然成风。

In Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, socialists, Chartists and other critics of capitalism began growing beards. As a young man, Friedrich Engels, who would go on to write “The Communist Manifesto” with Karl Marx, organized a “moustache evening” among his friends to taunt cleanshaven bourgeois “philistinism.” Marx himself cultivated a huge beard and thick mustache. A Prussian spy later sent to keep tabs on him reported with a mixture of awe and anxiety: “His hair and beard are quite black. The latter he does not shave.”

在1830、40年代，欧洲的社会主义者、宪章运动人士及其他资本主义批判者开始蓄须。一个名叫弗里德里希·恩格斯(Friedrich Engels)的小伙子，也就是日后与卡尔·马克思(Karl Marx)共同起草《共产党宣言》的那个人，在朋友中间组织了一个叫做“髭须之夜”的活动，对刮脸的布尔乔亚“庸俗风气”大加奚落。马克思本人就留着一脸蓬勃的大胡子。一名负责监视他的普鲁士间谍对此显得既敬畏又不安，他在报告中说：“他的头发和胡子相当黑。而且后者是从来不刮的。”

Beards were scary to capitalists. But after reactionaries crushed the violent uprisings of 1848 in Continental Europe, the threat of what the Times of London described that year as “foreign bearded propagandists” began receding in the capitalist imagination. In response, beards started to make inroads among the defenders of free enterprise in Britain and the United States. As one historian of the hirsute, Christopher Oldstone-Moore of Wright State University, has concluded, “fearful associations of facial hair dissolved, and respectable men were at liberty to let their beards grow.”

资本家害怕络腮胡。然而，1848年欧洲大陆的武装起义被反动势力镇压后，被那一年的伦敦《泰晤士报》(Times)形容为“外国大胡子煽动家”的威胁，在资产阶级心目中渐渐变得不那么危险。其结果是，英国和美国的企业经营自由捍卫者的脸上，开始出现胡须。正如研究毛发历史的莱特州立大学(Wright State University)学者克里斯托夫·欧德斯东-莫尔(Christopher Oldstone-Moore)所推断的，“胡须的恐怖联想淡化了，上流人士可以自由自在地蓄须了。”

Indeed, beards became an emblem of bourgeois masculinity. Proponents of the new “beard movement” (yes, it was called that) argued that “the bondage of the beard to the dictatorship of an effeminate fashion” had yielded a world of “woman-faced men.”

事实上，络腮胡变成了一种中产阶级男性的标志。新兴的“络腮胡运动”（是的，就叫这个名字）的倡导者们提出，“对络腮胡的禁锢，是一种娘娘腔时尚的专制”，导致这个世界到处是“长着女人脸的男人”。

Many factors contributed to this trend. In the United States, the gold rush that began in 1849 threw countless middle-class men into a get-rich-quick world of prospecting where shaving was discretionary. The Civil War must also be credited, as wide-eyed boys went off to war cleanshaven and returned as bearded men.

这股趋势是多方面因素造成的。在美国，1840年开始的淘金潮，让无数中产阶级男性奔向可以一夜暴富的勘探世界，而在那里，没人在乎你刮不刮胡子。南北战争肯定也起到了作用，嘴边没毛的天真男孩上了战场，归来时已经是满脸胡须的大丈夫。

Notably, this is when we witness the rise of facial hair as an essential accouterment of the capitalist class. Jay Gould, the most feared financier of the era, grew a beard that concealed most of his face, making an already inscrutable countenance even more difficult to read. Other robber barons followed suit.

值得注意的是，我们看到，胡须正是在这时兴起，成为资产阶级的一个基本装饰的。杰·古尔德(Jay Gould)，那个时代最令人畏惧的金融家，蓄着几乎覆盖整张脸的大胡子，导致他那高深莫测的表情愈发难以读解。其他强盗贵族纷纷效仿。

These men didn’t view themselves as conformists, much less corporate drones, but as rugged individualists who single-handedly built vast business empires. Their beards became part of their larger-than-life brand. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Collis P. Huntington, William Henry Vanderbilt and almost every other member of the vilified capitalist class sported extravagant facial hair.

这些男人认为自己不是墨守成规的人，更不是企业奴隶，他们是顽强的实业家，凭一己之力打造商业帝国。络腮胡成为了他们超脱凡俗的个人品牌的一部分。亨利·克莱·弗里克(Henry Clay Frick)、安德鲁·卡内基(Andrew Carnegie)、科里斯·P·亨廷顿(Collis P. Huntington)、威廉·亨利·范德比尔特(William Henry Vanderbilt)，那个饱受唾骂的资产阶级几乎个个长须虬髯。

But nothing lasts forever. From the 1870s onward, as the workers’ rebellion revived internationally, a new wave of labor radicals sported long, unruly beards. In the popular press, as the conflict between labor and capital turned increasingly violent in the 1880s, facial hair became a shorthand for the forcible resistance to capitalism. Illustrated newspapers covering the Haymarket bombing in 1886 in Chicago showed radicals wearing unkempt, tangled beards.

然而什么事都有个起落。从1870年代开始，世界各地的无产者掀起了反抗的风潮，新一代劳工激进分子留着又长又乱的络腮胡。到了1880年代，随着劳资冲突越来越趋向暴力，胡须成了强力反抗资本主义的一个代名词。从1886年芝加哥干草市场爆炸案当时的画报报道中可以看到，激进分子蓄着凌乱的、打着结的大胡子。

Cartoonists soon began depicting labor, and strikers in particular, as modern-day Samsons, pulling down the columns of an orderly society, killing their capitalist adversaries and themselves in the process. One barber quoted by this newspaper around the turn of the century put the matter bluntly, when describing various “cranks” and radicals: “They carry their banners on their faces, proclaiming them Populists or Anarchists, or some other sort of ists.”

没过多久，漫画家就开始把劳动者，尤其是罢工的劳动者，描绘成现代参孙(Samson)了，他们推倒旧社会的支柱，与资产阶级敌人同归于尽。在世纪之交的一份报纸上，一位受访的理发师说的很直白，那些“怪人”和激进分子“把口号挂在脸上，宣称他们是民粹主义者、无政府主义者，或者是其他的什么主义者。”

Most “respectable” men, including capitalists, ran from this image. While the invention of the safety razor by King C. Gillette in 1901 is often blamed for the demise of the beard, businessmen (and labor leaders eager to avoid the taint of radicalism) had already gone for a neatly trimmed mustache before going entirely cleanshaven by the dawn of the new century. The changing fashion may also have reflected a shift away from the untrammeled, individualistic capitalism of the Gilded Age to something more corporate, faceless — and beardless.

大多数“体面”的男人，包括资本家，要避开这种形象。很多人把络腮胡的终结怪在1901年发明了安全剃须刀的金·C·吉列(King C. Gillette)头上，其实商人（以及迫切想和激进主义划清界限的劳工领袖）在此之前已经开始转向精心修剪的小胡子，并最终在新世纪到来之时选择把胡须完全刮干净。这种风尚的嬗变，或许正因应了资本主义的转型，从镀金时代的狂放不羁、个性张扬，转向某种更重集团的、没有面孔——没有胡须——的形象。

In succeeding decades, beards and mustaches all but disappeared. The organization man of 20th-century America was cast as cleanshaven, his individuality subsumed into a larger, corporate identity. Iconic critics of capitalism — Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh — kept alive the identification of facial hair with leftist politics.

接下来几十年里，大小胡子都不见了。20世纪美国的公司男性形象是不留须的，他的个性被庞大的、集团的身份认同吞没。资本主义批判者中的代表人物——切·格瓦拉(Che Guevara)、菲德尔·卡斯特罗(Fidel Castro)、胡志明(Ho Chi Minh)——秉持了左派政治的蓄须传统。

But with the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Communism, the groundwork for a scruffy capitalism was laid. In the semiotics of capital today, whiskers no longer code as a threat. With free market ideology essentially unopposed by any major power and energized by the entrepreneurial swagger of the technology world, beards are back in business.

然而，冷战的结束，共产主义的溃败，为一种不修边幅的资本主义打下基础。依照今天的资本符号学，连鬓的胡须不再是个威胁。自由市场思想已经没有值得一提的敌人，再加上科技世界那些如日中天的创业家们的推动，于是络腮胡重现商界。