The Emperor's New Clothes Redux

I have now thought further on my posting of last November. In my opinion, Hans Christian Andersen's tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes" in fact has a highly unsatisfactory, less-than-credible ending.

Why should an emperor - a man blessed with a noble upbringing and, no doubt, an expensive education - suddenly come to believe that he's walking around naked, simply on the say-so of some filthy street urchin? Surely the "man in the street", whom this urchin embodies, is, typically, a Sun reader, a player of the National Lottery, a member of the Working Class, and, basically, a fucking thick cunt. Exactly the sort of person, in other words, who, by his very nature, wouldn't be able to see a magic suit of clothes. Indeed, if I were the emperor, I'd be more worried if hoi poloi actually could see my clothes, because this would mean that the lumpen proletariat were at, or even above, my own intellectual level, instead of way, way below me, as God intended.

Notwithstanding this Ultimate Truth, however, the visibility aspects of one's wardrobe could be potentially troublesome for other reasons. Take, for example, the weekly wash. The people who normally go to the launderette on an emperor's behalf are invariably dimbulb menials. But if the emperor entrusted his magic clothes to such as these, they, of course, wouldn't be able to see them, so they'd be forever losing his socks, putting coloureds in with whites, and sometimes - because the "Do not tumble-dry" and "No bleach" signs would be invisible to them, too - even ruining complete outfits.

To avoid this distressing scenario, the emperor would be obliged, instead, to hire top academics and scientists to do his washing and ironing, as they'd be the only ones with the intellectual capacity to see what they were doing. The downside of this, though, is that people like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking probably wouldn't feel fulfilled in their new jobs, and so would flee abroad, causing a brain-drain. Their places in academia would then be taken by people teaching crappy courses like Media Studies, Sociology, and Coronation Street Appreciation, thus dumbing down the nation's universities (even more so than they currently are, I mean, if that’s at all feasible).

Another problem with magic, royalty-related clothes is that, eventually, their designs would be copied, much as, for instance, the Emmanuels' designs for the Princess of Wales' clothes were copied. Consequently, the top fashion magazines would be full of photographs of models wearing these magic creations. This could lead to a situation where thick-as-pigshit newsagents, to whom the garments would be invisible, would mistakenly put publications such as Harpers & Queen and Vogue up with the top-shelf wank mags. Or worse, in their manifest error, they might believe that top-shelf wank mags such as Knave, BigJugs, and Farm Fun were, in fact, legitimate fashion magazines (albeit with their models in some pretty imaginative poses). Then someone such as Donatella Versace might end up being asked why she's allowing someone modelling her latest spring fashions to be photographed sucking a horse's cock or getting it anally from a man with a 14 inch dick.

I suppose the answer to all of this is quite simple: Pay the tailors who produce the magic clothes with "magic money" and see how they react. (Then again, I suppose it could be argued that anyone who’s been paying with Visa and MasterCard over recent years has been doing exactly that, hence the present Credit Crunch.)