Section C
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
问.
How can people best understand a particular fashion in an era, according to Ford?
问.
What does the author think of Ford’s writing?
