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  3. Last June, Men’s Fashion Week in Milan took place a few days after Miuccia P

Last June, Men’s Fashion Week in Milan took place a few days after Miuccia P

游客2023-12-15  14
问题     Last June, Men’s Fashion Week in Milan took place a few days after Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, who runs the business end of their empire, had raised $2.1 billion with a long-delayed, much ballyhooed initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Both the I.P.O. and Prada’s runway show—a collection of Day-Glo floral prints and nerdy plaids— inspired complaints from Giorgio Armani. "Fashion today is in the hands of the banks and of the stock market and not of its owners," he told the press. He went on to scold Prada for "bad taste that becomes chic." "Her clothes", he added, "are sometimes ugly."
    Armani’s perception was hardly novel, and Prada might not have disagreed—"I fight against my good taste," she has said—though she also might have pointed out that when bankers want a fashion insurance policy they buy one of Armani’s suits. He is the champion of the risk-averse, and Prada has always slyly perverted the canons of impeccability that his brand embodies. Only in the dressing room do you discover that her ostensibly proper little pleated skirts, ladylike silk blouses, and lace dinner suits are a test of your cool. If you can’t wear them tongue-in-cheek, as Prada herself does—thumbing her crooked nose at received ideas about beauty and sex appeal—they can make you look like a governess.
    Invincible female self-possession is a central theme of the joint retrospective that opens in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: Impossible Conversations." Its subjects were born six decades apart, and they never met, though some of their affinities seem almost genetic. They both had strict Catholic girlhoods in upper-crust families, with traditional expectations for women, and they both took heart from maternal aunts whose feistiness defied the mold. Schiaparelli is the more patrician—her mother descended from the dukes of Tuscany—but her father was a university professor, and so was Prada’s. Neither woman set out in life to design clothes, or even learned to sew. They were both ardent rebels and feminists who came of age at moments of ferment in art and politics that ratified their disdain for conformity. Schiaparelli was involved with the Dada movement at its inception in Greenwich Village, after the First World War; Prada was a left-wing graduate student in Milan during the radical upheavals of the nineteen-seventies.
    These heady adventures delayed their careers. Schiaparelli was thirty-seven and Prada was thirty-nine when they delivered their first collections. But experience of the real world, which was a man’s world for both of them, made them intolerant of female passivity and desperation. They don’t really care what makes a woman desirable to men. Their work asks you to consider what makes a woman desirable to herself.
    Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, the curators of the Costume Institute, originally conceived of the retrospective as "an imaginary conversation," Bolton told me. But, as they began to compile quotations from Schiaparelli and to interview Prada, they realized that this conceit was too tame. It is doubtful that the notoriously touchy Schiaparelli would have been happy about sharing a double bill, even with such an illustrious compatriot, or that Prada would have submitted to comparison with a contemporary. She is widely considered the most influential designer in the world today partly because her enigmatic code is so hard to copy: she changes the password every season.
    The title of the show alludes to a famous column in the Vanity Fair of the nineteen-thirties— "Impossible Interviews"—which was illustrated by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Among the mismatched sparring partners whom he caricatured with impious glee were Joseph Stalin and Schiaparelli.
    Her "interview" with the dictator appeared in 1936, when she was at the height of her glory, and had recently returned to Paris from a French trade fair in Moscow, where her presence made news. No other couturier had been willing to risk the censure that Schiaparelli received—and shrugged off—for consorting with the Bolsheviks, and, while she was there, she presented a capsule collection of Soviet-friendly fashions suitable for mass production. One of the ensembles was a simple black dress with a high neck, worn under a red coat, with outsize pockets, and a beret.
                                            From The New Yorker, March 26, 2012 [br] According to the context, what’s the meaning of the underlined word "enigmatic" in paragraph 5?
选项 A、Charming.
B、Magnetic.
C、Mysterious.
D、Peculiar.
答案 C
解析 本题为词义题。文章第五段最后一句…so hard to copy：she changes the password every season可知普拉达的时尚代码很难复制：她每季都改换时尚密码。选项A是迷人的，选项B是有磁力的，选项C是神秘的，选项D是奇特的。四个选项中，选项C是最接近的选项，因为经常变换，难以捉摸而显得神秘，而选项D中的独特性虽然也在文中有这个层面的意思，但是peculiar的“奇怪的、陌生的”这些词义方面并没有被提及。综上所述应选择C。
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