2014.10.27 夏洛克-福尔摩斯，不可能的时尚偶像

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Sherlock Holmes, Unlikely Style Icon
The detective's iconic tweeds, robes, and deerstalker hat came from the imaginations of illustrators and filmmakers far more than from Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

By Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
OCTOBER 27, 2014
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Courtesy of the Museum of London
The Museum of London recently debuted Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die, a major exhibition devoted the fictional detective and the real city he inhabited. The items on display include a rare manuscript of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in Rue Morgue—a key influence on Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle—and a portrait of Conan Doyle never before seen in public. But alongside these one-of-a-kind historical treasures, visitors will find two curiously modern artifacts: the coat and dressing gown worn by Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock, the BBC’s 21st-century reboot of the Holmes stories.

While these costumes are obvious bait for fanboys (and fangirls) who might not be clued into the Victorian literary sensation behind the modern-day television sensation, they also serve as a reminder that Holmes’s fashion choices, from page to screen, have always launched real-world trends. In Conan Doyle’s lifetime, Holmes’s name and likeness were used to advertise pipes and shirts as well as tea, toffee, and mouthwash. More recently, Esquire, FHM, and GQ have advised readers on how to get the Sherlock look. The exhibition provides a retrospective of Sherlockian style, investigating how it has evolved while retaining its instantly recognizable Victorian fashion DNA. The museum even commissioned a Scottish textile mill to create a signature tweed in Holmes’s honor, and a concurrent show features fashion photographer Kasia Wozniak’s prints made using a 1890 field camera.


Courtesy of the Museum of London
This lasting fashion legacy is all the more extraordinary considering how stingy Conan Doyle was with descriptions of dress. Our image of Holmes comes almost entirely from his illustrator, Sidney Paget, whose elegant, angular prototype influenced every incarnation thereafter. Though he didn’t always share them with readers, however, Conan Doyle clearly had firm ideas about Holmes’s appearance; he once protested that a poster for the 1899 play Sherlock Holmes made the detective look “about five feet high” and “badly dressed.” And Timothy Long, the Museum of London’s fashion curator, points out that Conan Doyle used a “lost language” of fashion. “The modern audience reading these stories often overlooks clues that were very obvious to contemporary readers,” he says. “Putting Watson in a morning coat or a frock coat indicated the time of day, for example.”


A Sidney Paget illustration (Courtesy of the Museum of London)
Long describes Holmes’s wardrobe as that of “a modern English gentleman. The greatcoat and the deerstalker were key components of any gentleman’s wardrobe in England at that time period.” Thanks to the popularity of the Holmes stories, plays, and films, they remain so in the popular imagination today. Holmes’s clothes in their various iterations are both timeless and very much of their times. The three most indelible Sherlocks—Paget’s original illustrations, Basil Rathbone in the 1930s, and Cumberbatch—all wear contemporary dress, yet they are all unmistakably the same character.

One movie poster called Holmes “the original caped crusader.”
Take that coat, for example. In the stories, Holmes was “enveloped” in an Ulster, a long, single-breasted coat with a small collar and an attached a hip-length cape. Conan Doyle also mentioned an “overcoat” (possibly the same one) and a “long grey travelling-cloak.” These have morphed over time into one stately, billowing garment, lending the character the mystery and panache of a superhero. (The poster for the 1965 film A Study in Terror called Holmes “the original caped crusader.”) Rathbone’s iconic tartan coat was tailored for the big screen, with a more mobile, elbow-length cape and a wide, face-framing collar. Cumberbatch’s coat—an off-the-rack number by British label Belstaff—was inspired not by the Victorian ulster but the 18th-century greatcoat, with its high, stiffened collar and wide lapels. Instead of a cape, its double-breasted front and pleated, belted back provide volume and movement.


Courtesy of the Museum of London
With his Ulster, the literary Holmes wore a cravat. Rathbone’s colorful silk scarves look almost feminine today, but they harmonized with 1930s fashions (think Fred Astaire). In Guy Ritchie’s steampunk-inspired Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr.’s flashy ascots are the only recognizably Holmesian aspect of his costumes, even if they seem more appropriate to circa 2008 Brooklyn than Victorian London. Cumberbatch’s blue-gray scarf functions as an extension of his coat (and eyes).


It was Paget who introduced the deerstalker, mentioned nowhere in Conan Doyle’s writings. (Holmes never uttered “Elementary, my dear Watson!” either.) As its name implies, it was a hunting garment, suitable for outdoor pursuits. Paget’s Holmes wore it in the country, never in London. However, Rathbone and subsequent Holmeses wore it everywhere, including indoors. As a trope, the deerstalker improved upon the generic “ear-flapped travelling-cap” Conan Doyle gave his hero. “Holmes never hunted,” exhibition curator Alex Werner reminds us. “But Conan Doyle used the metaphor of hunting to express Holmes’s pursuit of the truth.” Though the deerstalker is no longer a staple of the English gentleman’s wardrobe, it makes an ironic appearance in Sherlock; Cumberbatch impulsively dons one to hide his face from the paparazzi, only to have it become his trademark. (His humiliating nom de tabloid is “Hat Detective.”) Downey, however, wore a fedora, in keeping with his Brooklyn hipster interpretation.


Courtesy of the Museum of London
His gentlemanly dress often hid what Conan Doyle called Holmes’s “Bohemian soul.” The melancholy, violin-playing, cocaine-injecting insomniac was betrayed by his off-duty clothes, specifically his collection of dressing gowns, which ranged from “mouse-colored” to a dandyish purple. The camel version on display at the Museum of London is the most subdued of several Cumberbatch wears in the BBC series.

Holmes was well aware of the power of clothing to reveal as well as transform. Anthropometry—a legitimate scientific discipline in the Victorian era—held that physical characteristics corresponded to character traits; Holmes’s high forehead indicated the mighty brain behind it. Clothing, by extension, could do the same—a perfectly reasonable assumption at a time when read-to-wear was in its infancy and those who could afford to still had their clothes custom-made. “Dress is a main character in the stories when it comes to providing clues for Holmes,” Long says. No scuffed shoe or scratched pocketwatch escaped his notice; the smallest sartorial detail could be the key to solving a case. He once deduced an entire psychological history from the “very ordinary black hat” that led him to the famous blue carbuncle.


Courtesy of the London Museum
Holmes’s methods—baffling to Watson—are well known to modern-day costume curators and conservators. “We are quite Sherlockian in our approach,” Long says. “We regularly look at wear marks, labels, and types of materials.” Inspired by the Holmes stories, Long and “an army of volunteers” scoured the museum’s archives for historical garments with tell-tale clues to the wearer’s identity. A pair of men’s evening shoes on display has circular wear marks on the soles, suggestive of dancing; a woman’s blouse with ink-stained sleeves recalls the one that helped Holmes identify his client as a typist in A Case of Identity.

A master of disguise, Holmes had an arsenal of unlikely alter egos, from an old lady to a “simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman.” Long notes that although Holmes’s borrowed makeup and wardrobe techniques from the Victorian stage, his disguises were not particularly theatrical or exotic, but “the disguises of the everyday.” In Sherlock, Cumberbatch has convincingly posed as a French waiter, a Guardsman, a hoodie-clad heroin addict, and a Pakistani terrorist.


Courtesy of the London Museum
But Cumberbatch’s greatest disappearing act is his effortless embodiment of Conan Doyle’s archetypal character: the angular silhouette, the hawk-like profile, the cape-like coat. A distinct lack of physical resemblance may be why the other modern-day TV Holmes, Elementary’s Jonny Lee Miller, has struggled to connect with viewers. Miller (like Downey) is more of a Watson than a Sherlock—compact and muscular rather than tall and lanky. It follows, then, that his clothes also break the mold. A floppy coat would not just envelop but swamp him; instead, a double-breasted pea coat provides warmth in the New York winters, while a red tartan scarf provides what little sartorial panache he possesses. But his endless supply of rumpled vests and ill-fitting blazers convey his Englishness—especially next to Lucy Liu’s quintessentially chic New Yorker of a Watson—while his habit of buttoning his shirts up to the chin telegraphs the character’s OCD tendencies. In this case, however, there’s no mystery why it’s Liu’s Watson wardrobe that has inspired style bloggers.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a fashion historian, curator, and journalist. Her most recent books are Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History and The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion.



夏洛克-福尔摩斯，不可能的时尚偶像
这位侦探标志性的斜纹软呢、长袍和鹿角帽来自插画师和电影制作人的想象，而不是来自阿瑟-柯南-道尔本人。

作者：Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
2014年10月27日


由伦敦博物馆提供
伦敦博物馆最近首次推出了《夏洛克-福尔摩斯：不死不休的人》，这是一个专门介绍这位虚构的侦探和他所居住的真实城市的大型展览。展品包括埃德加-爱伦-坡的《太平间街谋杀案》的罕见手稿--对福尔摩斯的创造者阿瑟-柯南-道尔的关键影响--以及柯南-道尔的画像，此前从未在公众面前见过。但是，除了这些独一无二的历史珍品之外，游客们还会发现两件奇怪的现代文物：本尼迪克特-康伯巴奇在《神探夏洛克》中穿的外套和长袍，这是BBC在21世纪重启的福尔摩斯故事。

虽然这些服装对那些可能不了解现代电视轰动背后的维多利亚时代文学轰动的粉丝（和女粉丝）来说是明显的诱饵，但它们也提醒人们，福尔摩斯的时尚选择，从页面到屏幕，一直都是现实世界的趋势。在柯南道尔生前，福尔摩斯的名字和肖像被用来为烟斗和衬衫以及茶、太妃糖和漱口水做广告。最近，《Esquire》、《FHM》和《GQ》为读者提供了关于如何获得夏洛克造型的建议。该展览提供了一个关于夏洛克风格的回顾，调查了它是如何在保留其可立即识别的维多利亚时代的时尚基因的同时进行演变的。博物馆甚至委托一家苏格兰纺织厂以福尔摩斯的名义创造了一种标志性的斜纹软呢，同时展出的还有时尚摄影师卡西娅-沃兹尼亚克（Kasia Wozniak）用1890年的野外相机拍摄的版画。


伦敦博物馆提供
考虑到柯南道尔对着装的描述是如此吝啬，这种持久的时尚遗产就更不寻常了。我们对福尔摩斯的印象几乎完全来自于他的插画师西德尼-佩吉特，他优雅、有棱有角的原型影响了此后的每一个化身。尽管柯南道尔并不总是与读者分享，但他显然对福尔摩斯的外貌有着坚定的想法；他曾经抗议说，1899年剧本《福尔摩斯》的一张海报让这位侦探看起来 "大约五英尺高"，而且 "穿着很差"。而伦敦博物馆的时尚策展人蒂莫西-朗（Timothy Long）指出，柯南道尔使用了一种 "失落的语言 "的时尚。"他说："阅读这些故事的现代观众往往忽略了对当代读者来说非常明显的线索。"例如，让华生穿上晨衣或连衣裙表示一天中的时间。"


西德尼-佩吉特的一幅插图（伦敦博物馆提供）
朗将福尔摩斯的衣柜描述为 "一个现代英国绅士的衣柜。大衣和鹿角帽是那个时期英国任何一个绅士衣柜的关键组成部分"。由于福尔摩斯故事、戏剧和电影的流行，它们在今天的大众想象中依然如此。福尔摩斯的各种衣服既是永恒的，又与他们的时代密切相关。三个最不可磨灭的福尔摩斯--佩吉特的原始插图、20世纪30年代的巴西尔-拉斯本和康伯巴奇--都穿着当代的服装，但他们都是明确无误的同一人物。

一张电影海报称福尔摩斯是 "最初的披肩十字军"。
以那件外套为例。在故事中，福尔摩斯被 "笼罩 "在阿尔斯特大衣中，这是一种长款单排扣大衣，有一个小领子，并附有一条长至臀部的披肩。柯南道尔还提到了一件 "大衣"（可能是同一件）和一件 "长灰色旅行斗篷"。随着时间的推移，这些都变成了一件庄重的、波浪形的衣服，使这个人物具有超级英雄的神秘感和潇洒感。(1965年电影《恐怖研究》（A Study in Terror）的海报称福尔摩斯是 "最初的斗篷十字军"）。拉斯本的标志性格子呢大衣是为大银幕量身定做的，有一个更灵活的、长及肘部的斗篷和一个宽大的、遮住脸部的领子。康伯巴奇的大衣是英国品牌Belstaff的现成产品，其灵感不是来自维多利亚时代的乌尔斯特，而是18世纪的大衣，有高而硬的衣领和宽大的翻领。与其说是披风，不如说是其双排扣的前襟和打褶、系带的后背提供了体积和运动。


伦敦博物馆提供
与他的阿尔斯特一起，文学界的福尔摩斯也戴着围巾。拉斯本的彩色丝巾在今天看来几乎是女性化的，但它们与1930年代的时尚相协调（想想弗雷德-阿斯泰尔）。在盖-里奇的蒸汽朋克风格的福尔摩斯电影中，小罗伯特-唐尼（Robert Downey Jr.）华丽的领结是他的服装中唯一可识别的福尔摩斯方面，尽管它们似乎更适合于2008年左右的布鲁克林而不是维多利亚时代的伦敦。康伯巴奇的蓝灰色围巾是他外套（和眼睛）的延伸。


是佩吉特引入了鹿角帽，在柯南道尔的著作中没有任何地方提到过鹿角帽。(福尔摩斯也从未说过 "基本原理，我亲爱的华生！")顾名思义，它是一种狩猎服，适合在户外活动。帕吉特笔下的福尔摩斯是在乡下穿的，从未在伦敦穿过。然而，拉斯本和后来的福尔摩斯在任何地方都穿着它，包括在室内。作为一个特例，鹿角帽比柯南道尔给他的英雄戴的一般的 "带耳旅行帽 "有所改进。"福尔摩斯从未打过猎，"展览策展人亚历克斯-沃纳提醒我们说。"但柯南道尔用打猎的比喻来表达福尔摩斯对真相的追求"。尽管鹿角帽不再是英国绅士衣柜中的主打产品，但它在《神探夏洛克》中却讽刺地出现了；康伯巴奇冲动地戴上了鹿角帽，以躲避狗仔队的镜头，结果却成为他的标志。(他羞辱性的小报名称是 "帽子侦探"。）而唐尼则戴着一顶联邦帽，与他在布鲁克林的潮人形象相一致。


伦敦博物馆提供
他的绅士打扮常常掩盖了柯南道尔所说的福尔摩斯的 "波西米亚灵魂"。这个忧郁的、拉小提琴的、注射可卡因的失眠者被他下班后的衣服出卖了，特别是他的礼服系列，从 "老鼠色 "到花哨的紫色都有。在伦敦博物馆展出的驼色版本是康伯巴奇在BBC系列中穿的几件中最低调的一件。

福尔摩斯很清楚服装的力量，它既能显示，也能改变。人体测量学--维多利亚时代的一门合法的科学学科--认为身体特征与性格特征相对应；福尔摩斯的高额头表明其背后有一个强大的大脑。推而广之，服装也能起到同样的作用--这在当时的读图时代是完全合理的假设，那些有能力的人仍然会定制自己的衣服。"朗说："在为福尔摩斯提供线索方面，服装是故事中的一个主要角色。任何擦伤的鞋子或划伤的怀表都逃不过他的眼睛；最小的衣着细节都可能成为破案的关键。他曾经从一顶 "非常普通的黑帽 "中推断出整个心理学历史，这使他找到了著名的蓝宝石。


伦敦博物馆提供
福尔摩斯的方法--对华生来说是莫名其妙的--对现代的服装策展人和保存人来说是众所周知的。朗说："我们的方法很像夏洛克，"他说。"我们经常查看磨损的痕迹、标签和材料的类型"。在福尔摩斯故事的启发下，Long和 "一支志愿者队伍 "在博物馆的档案中寻找那些能说明穿着者身份的历史服装。展出的一双男式晚装鞋的鞋底有圆形的磨损痕迹，让人联想到跳舞；一件袖子上有墨水痕迹的女式上衣让人想起《身份之谜》中帮助福尔摩斯确认其客户为打字员的那件。

作为一个伪装大师，福尔摩斯有一个不太可能的改头换面的武器库，从一个老太太到一个 "头脑简单的非传统神职人员"。朗指出，尽管福尔摩斯从维多利亚时代的舞台上借鉴了化妆和衣着技术，但他的伪装并不是特别戏剧化或异国情调，而是 "日常的伪装"。在《神探夏洛克》中，康伯巴奇曾令人信服地伪装成一个法国服务员、一个卫兵、一个穿着连帽衫的海洛因瘾君子和一个巴基斯坦恐怖分子。


伦敦博物馆提供
但康伯巴奇最大的消失行为是他毫不费力地体现了柯南-道尔的典型角色：棱角分明的轮廓、鹰一样的外形、斗篷一样的外套。明显缺乏身体上的相似性可能是另一个现代电视福尔摩斯--《小学》中的乔尼-李-米勒--难以与观众产生共鸣的原因。米勒（和唐尼一样）更像是华生，而不是夏洛克--身材紧凑，肌肉发达，而不是高大瘦弱。因此，他的衣服也打破了这个模式。一件蓬松的大衣不仅会包裹住他，而且会淹没他；相反，一件双排扣的豌豆大衣在纽约的冬天提供了温暖，而一条红色的格子呢围巾为他提供了一点时尚的感觉。但他无休止地穿着皱巴巴的马甲和不合身的西装外套，传达了他的英国人身份--尤其是在露西-刘（Lucy Liu）饰演的典型的时尚纽约人华生面前，他把衬衫的扣子扣到下巴的习惯，暗示了这个角色的强迫症倾向。然而，在这种情况下，刘的华生衣橱激发了时尚博主的灵感，这并不神秘。

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell是一位时尚历史学家、策展人和记者。她最近的书是《这一天穿的》。创造历史的衣服》和《我们结婚的方式》。婚礼时尚的全球历史》。