‘The Empire’s New Birthday Suit’

A Retold version of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ 

Once upon a time to come, there lived a campus community of bourgeois Millennials, and everyday they frequented their classes and various situations showcasing to all and sundry how they wanted others to think of them through wildly differing fashions that really reflected what they implicitly thought about themselves. Their outfits ranged from the flashy to the banal, from business-like to hippy-ish, and on the surface everyone seemed to accept that they had each freely chosen their particular appearance, but in truth, even if they would never bring themselves to admit it, most of these students were surprisingly unhappy. They all knew, deep down perhaps, that what they wore were just aspirational costumes; they were pretending to be themselves and who they thought themselves to be was not at all who they really were. Since this was an impasse all previous generations of students had already come up against, most accepted that this underlying discontent was just another amongst the many miseries that went along with tertiary education. And so life went on.

The most conspicuously fashionable ones among them were a universally beloved couple, Nina and Tefo. Not only were they the most prominent and steadfast interracial pairing on campus but they somehow managed to juxtapose an intelligent, vocal radicalism with a cool sophistication and God-given dress-sense more commonly seen in pretentious French films from the Sixties. One uncommon day, they were scouted by a faceless tech corporation to be the very first Beta test subjects for a revolutionary new product-line called ‘Clothing 2.0’. This was just the latest in a seemingly endless sequence of epochal innovations this faceless tech corporation had been introducing to the marketplace for decades now. Much of daily life had already been made nigh-on unrecognizable by their self-driving cars, networked appliances and 3D-printed Food, but this next revolution was set to affect not only how people lived their quotidian hours but even how Life itself was performed and thought of. Nina and Tefo felt honoured, both signing up for the trial-run as soon as they’d finished hearing the pitch.

The pitch was this: ‘Clothing 2.0’ was a transparent one-size-fits-all suit that supposedly projected into the minds of all who observed its wearer the colours and emotions they couldn’t help but feel at each and every moment. You would look at a person and know them better than they knew themselves. And no-one would ever need to expand their wardrobe again as freedom of choice would be replaced by direct expression. Because this was the next big thing from a faceless tech corporation no-one stopped to question how the science behind the invention would actually work, but no matter. They all assumed it was something to do with brainwave-sensors and face-appraising indicators and psycho-sensual measures and all that, so they concluded it really shouldn’t worry them.

And so Tefo and Nina wore the suits everywhere, and with such open confidence that every onlooker of their generation realized that even if they thought they were only seeing two twenty-somethings in see-through ponchos it was merely their own inability to encompass the extent of their matchless personalities that prevented them from witnessing the marvelous effects the corporation had promised. It was clear to everyone that since the faceless tech corporation had never disappointed any of its customers before, and as such would never dream of putting out a faulty product-line, it just had to be an incidentally personal failing if one failed to actually see how the Clothing 2.0 wearers were feeling. The message was lost, the link went unmade and all you saw was a beautiful, trendy person wearing a plastic bag, poor you.

So despite – or maybe because of – this confused and inaccurate assumption, when the suits went on general sale they sold out quickly enough, and were so very popular, that dozens of ordinary designers and retail chains found themselves equally quickly out of business and the Faceless Tech Corporation’s stocks rocketed upwards once again. Within a few weeks, the campus had been conquered by Clothing 2.0 and everyone had followed Nina and Tefo’s lead in donning the suits and strolling from class to class without ever considering what anyone else actually thought they were seeing when gazing upon their get-ups. The general ruse was maintained via various methods, but the implicit understanding was that until someone troubled to point out the situation, everyone else would just read each other’s faces more carefully to gauge their feelings and would always react to their apparently projected selves in kind. This actually achieved much the same effect as Clothing 2.0 had originally promised and generally lead to more considered and empathetic communication throughout the student community. But it only took a few days before one lowly first-year, sitting with a furrowed brow at the very top of the campus’s central plaza, had the gall to ask a friend in whispered tones whether he also had never seen anything but the same old transparent suits when chancing to look upon any of his fellow scholars. The friend brushed him off and repeated the now well-worn truism that the suits could only properly be seen by people who understood other people, and if neither of them could actually see the projection effects per se, that shouldn’t mean they had the right to assert that others couldn’t possibly see them, and it might be too impertinent to actually ask them if they could on top of that, so maybe he should just keep such inquiries to himself…

‘Fair enough’, thought the first-year, as he continued noshing his noodles.
In fact, what everyone could see, which perpetuated the general illusion for so much longer than it would’ve otherwise run for, was everyone else’s naked bodies under the suits. Underwear apparently took away from the effect, or at least the rumour got around pretty quickly to that effect. And so, intentional or not, the campus was forever afterwards a far more transparent institution. Soon enough, everyone came to embrace this new reality.