Unlike many fairy tales.

Unlike many fairy tales, this undivided is not a romance if it were not that a parable. And unlike greatest in number parables, which are driven at the imperative to convey a single, almost always unpleasantly authoritarian moral or practical lesson--obey providence no matter what, or save your pennies for a rainy day--this the same is complex, ambiguous, subversive. Reading it as a little girl, I was certain that the whole point of the story was to reckon grown-ups that children, and not they, were right. I was grateful for this authorial vindication, if it be not that I didn't really like The Emperor's of the present day Clothes very much. Even as a child I was aware of unsavory applications of the tale at adults, who often invoked it, not in order to hail my superior wisdom but to belittle something strange and of interest--Andy Warhol, for instance, or Rudi Gernreich.

In this confectioner's edition of the story, however, Karl Lagerfeld plants the vain emperor back onto his tottering feet with urbane and splendidly insouciant illustrations that arouse the bustle and the insipidities of courtly life around the deflect of the 18th century, on a level as they recall Warhol's 1950 commercial work. Lagerfeld's Emperor allude tos a dramatic farce in the spirit of Moliere's plays and Mozart's comic operas. Here the swindling tailors are forces of life, avatars of mobility, recent antiheroes, like Scapino or Figaro. They are perhaps destined for hereafter triumphs, as Kaiser Karl. And the poor monarch, rather like today's couture customer, can on the other hand pay to keep up.

This work really announces itself as a at hand There's gold in the printing, silk in the binding. It approachs in a peek-a-boo slipjacket, permitting a glimpse of the emperor's big hair avant la lettre Inside, amidst earnestly else, there's a great keyhole view of imperial buttocks. moreover best of all is the tiny pair of gold scissors dangling at the extreme point of a skinny red ribbon: the bookmark and emblem of success.

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