The Emperor’s New Clothes
A telling satire on fashionable thinking among the elite.
1837
Introduction
Why do fashionable ideas continue to circulate among the elite, long after ordinary people have realised that they are nonsense? Andersen’s folk-tale explains it brilliantly.
ONCE upon a time, some weavers arrived at court, and offered to make robes so fine that only men fit for the very highest offices could even see them.
The Emperor paid them handsomely, and they set to work.
By and by, the Emperor went with his ministers to learn how things were going. When he found only empty looms, he casually asked his ministers what they saw.
Fearing that he might think them unfit for their high offices, they described wonderful robes of many colours. ‘That’, replied the Emperor hastily, ‘is what I see too.’
Now the weavers suggested that he try the robes on. His chamberlains helped him off with every last stitch, and on with the clothes no one could see, and they walked red-faced back through the town.
Suddenly a common boy cried, ‘Look, the Emperor has no clothes on!’. But neither the Emperor nor his ministers dared admit to each other what all of them knew to be true.
Based on The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.