爲什麼商界精英又開始留大鬍子

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.

剃鬚業光景慘淡。經歷一個世紀頗爲穩定的增長後，剃刀等剃鬚設備的生產商，在過去幾年裏收入一直持平甚至下降。絡腮鬍又回來了。

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.

這股復興的潮流中，最驚人的一點是越來越多的商界領袖正在蓄起鬍鬚，這是百年來的頭一遭。谷歌(Google)聯合創始人謝爾蓋·布林(Sergey Brin)、高盛首席執行官勞爾德·C·貝蘭克梵(Lloyd kfein)、Salesforce創始人兼首席執行官、億萬富翁馬克·貝尼奧夫(Marc Benioff)，只是其中幾個顯眼的例子。

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.

我們大可以把滿面鬍鬚的商界領袖簡單地看做絡腮鬍潮流的一種延伸，或是職場環境正在變得更隨意的又一個例證。然而透過鬍鬚和資本主義的歷史糾纏，可以看出其中有更深層次的力量在起作用。

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.

董事會上的絡腮鬍，在歷史上一直是資本主義與其批判者的勢力對比晴雨表。當資本主義在扮演一種更具個人色彩的豪客角色時，企業家和投機者的面頰就會繁茂起來。當致力於摧毀資本主義的力量佔據優勢——或者在受到充分監管的，沒有面孔的大企業充當經濟生活的主角時——絡腮鬍消身匿跡。

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.

在近現代的多數時間裏，絡腮鬍和小鬍子只存活在社會的邊緣。在美國，開國元勳們放棄了鬍鬚。光潔的面孔在歐洲各國的資產階級中也蔚然成風。

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，歐洲的社會主義者、憲章運動人士及其他資本主義批判者開始蓄鬚。一個名叫弗里德里希·恩格斯(Friedrich Engels)的小夥子，也就是日後與卡爾·馬克思(Karl Marx)共同起草《共產黨宣言》的那個人，在朋友中間組織了一個叫做“髭鬚之夜”的活動，對刮臉的布爾喬亞“庸俗風氣”大加奚落。馬克思本人就留着一臉蓬勃的大鬍子。一名負責監視他的普魯士間諜對此顯得既敬畏又不安，他在報告中說：“他的頭髮和鬍子相當黑。而且後者是從來不刮的。”

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.”

資本家害怕絡腮鬍。然而，1848年歐洲大陸的武裝起義被反動勢力鎮壓後，被那一年的倫敦《泰晤士報》(Times)形容爲“外國大鬍子煽動家”的威脅，在資產階級心目中漸漸變得不那麼危險。其結果是，英國和美國的企業經營自由捍衛者的臉上，開始出現鬍鬚。正如研究毛髮歷史的萊特州立大學(Wright State University)學者克里斯托夫·歐德斯東-莫爾(Christopher Oldstone-Moore)所推斷的，“鬍鬚的恐怖聯想淡化了，上流人士可以自由自在地蓄鬚了。”

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.”

事實上，絡腮鬍變成了一種中產階級男性的標誌。新興的“絡腮鬍運動”（是的，就叫這個名字）的倡導者們提出，“對絡腮鬍的禁錮，是一種娘娘腔時尚的專制”，導致這個世界到處是“長着女人臉的男人”。

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.

這股趨勢是多方面因素造成的。在美國，1840年開始的淘金潮，讓無數中產階級男性奔向可以一夜暴富的勘探世界，而在那裏，沒人在乎你刮不刮鬍子。南北戰爭肯定也起到了作用，嘴邊沒毛的天真男孩上了戰場，歸來時已經是滿臉鬍鬚的大丈夫。

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，我們看到，鬍鬚正是在這時興起，成爲資產階級的一個基本裝飾的。傑·古爾德(Jay Gould)，那個時代最令人畏懼的金融家，蓄着幾乎覆蓋整張臉的大鬍子，導致他那高深莫測的表情愈發難以讀解。其他強盜貴族紛紛效仿。

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.

這些男人認爲自己不是墨守成規的人，更不是企業奴隸，他們是頑強的實業家，憑一己之力打造商業帝國。絡腮鬍成爲了他們超脫凡俗的個人品牌的一部分。亨利·克萊·弗裏克(Henry Clay Frick)、安德魯·卡內基(Andrew Carnegie)、科里斯·P·亨廷頓(Collis P. Huntington)、威廉·亨利·範德比爾特(William Henry Vanderbilt)，那個飽受唾罵的資產階級幾乎個個長鬚虯髯。

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.

然而什麼事都有個起落。從1870年代開始，世界各地的無產者掀起了反抗的風潮，新一代勞工激進分子留着又長又亂的絡腮鬍。到了1880年代，隨着勞資衝突越來越趨向暴力，鬍鬚成了強力反抗資本主義的一個代名詞。從1886年芝加哥乾草市場爆炸案當時的畫報報道中可以看到，激進分子蓄着凌亂的、打着結的大鬍子。

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.”

沒過多久，漫畫家就開始把勞動者，尤其是罷工的勞動者，描繪成現代參孫(Samson)了，他們推倒舊社會的支柱，與資產階級敵人同歸於盡。在世紀之交的一份報紙上，一位受訪的理髮師說的很直白，那些“怪人”和激進分子“把口號掛在臉上，宣稱他們是民粹主義者、無政府主義者，或者是其他的什麼主義者。”

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.

大多數“體面”的男人，包括資本家，要避開這種形象。很多人把絡腮鬍的終結怪在1901年發明了安全剃鬚刀的金·C·吉列(King C. Gillette)頭上，其實商人（以及迫切想和激進主義劃清界限的勞工領袖）在此之前已經開始轉向精心修剪的小鬍子，並最終在新世紀到來之時選擇把鬍鬚完全刮乾淨。這種風尚的嬗變，或許正因應了資本主義的轉型，從鍍金時代的狂放不羈、個性張揚，轉向某種更重集團的、沒有面孔——沒有鬍鬚——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.

接下來幾十年裏，大小鬍子都不見了。20世紀美國的公司男性形象是不留須的，他的個性被龐大的、集團的身份認同吞沒。資本主義批判者中的代表人物——切·格瓦拉(Che Guevara)、菲德爾·卡斯特羅(Fidel Castro)、胡志明(Ho Chi Minh)——秉持了左派政治的蓄鬚傳統。

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，冷戰的結束，共產主義的潰敗，爲一種不修邊幅的資本主義打下基礎。依照今天的資本符號學，連鬢的鬍鬚不再是個威脅。自由市場思想已經沒有值得一提的敵人，再加上科技世界那些如日中天的創業家們的推動，於是絡腮鬍重現商界。