The Emperors Are Wearing No Clothes-And They Know It
From our earliest days in life, we are taught that wealth, value, and power are traditionally demonstrated and defined by what is worn, eaten, and owned by the elite classes. Luxurious fabrics, specialty meats and wines, large estates, rare stones and gems, anything that is ostentatious and difficult to acquire is one of the keys to presenting oneself as influential and worthy of the grandeur side of life. Owning these visual distinctions of societal hierarchy was so important to the upper classes that many sumptuary laws have been implemented since at least the 8th century in order to ban lower classes of society from owning luxuries, making it easy to identify and sort through the “haves and have-nots” in their respective societies. These fineries served the sole purpose of accenting and perpetuating the monopoly upper classes had in the expression and distinction of themselves, their wealth and power; offering nothing tangible to wider society beyond their symbolism and exclusivity. One of my favorite depictions of this phenomenon of the garments defining the worth of the man is in Hans Christian Andersen’s short story The Emperor’s New Clothes from 1837. Upon hearing that there were two weavers that could make clothes out of the finest materials that allegedly only the worthy can see, the Emperor thinks to himself after paying for them to fashion him a robe:
“Not only were the colours and patterns extraordinarily pretty, but the clothes that were made of the stuff had this marvellous property:
that they were invisible to anyone who was either unfit for his situation or else was intolerably stupid. “Very excellent clothes those must be,” thought the Emperor; “if I wore them I could tell which are the men in my realm who aren’t fit for the posts they hold. I could tell clever people from stupid ones: to be sure that stuff must be made for me directly.”
His being tricked into parading himself in his underwear, stripped of all his luxuries not only reveals his personal naivete and incompetence as Emperor, it also dissolves the symbolic barriers between the high and low borne, for what is an emperor without his fineries if not just a man? His only option is to carry on and put on a distinguished and confident air in order to maintain the illusion of power and hierarchy; or else let his nudity completely expose the truth of his mediocrity. To own luxury is to be extraordinary.
This enduring symbolism of the superiority of the upper class pervades to today in part with the wearing of designer brands and fabulous jewelry, which is still worn by the rich and famous in their everyday lives as well as at events and runways. What has changed, however, is the availability and access to finery in regards to the middle and working class. Nowadays in the Modern Era, technology and the internet provide easy and fast access to these high quality goods or, if one is unable to afford the real thing, they can buy a look-a-like of these modern embodyments of wealth and power. As clothing and style becomes more democratized, and these marks of the elite classes no longer strictly point out “haves and have-nots” as before.
So, how can the upper classes create a new visual representation of their wealth and status, what object or lifestyle can they attain that cannot be replicated or ‘appropriated’ by the lower classes?
Unrestricted Nudity.
Our modern cultural emperors have now outgrown their usual fineries, stripping them off to unveil a new symbol of privilege: the ability to dress and act more ‘suggestive’ in public . They have the unspoken power of being able to parade outside in their underwear, and still be upheld in their social position. While I’m not suggesting that nudity should be viewed as inherently shameful in anyway, or that there is no cultural backlash at all to these displays; nudity has become a symbol of a certain level of power and influence because of the inaccessibility to the average person who cannot indulge in this unrestricted display of themselves without risking inevitable social ridicule, slut-shaming, and backlash.
This is, especially the case with women, a form of freedom to have one’s body (consensually) shown to the world and not be completely cast out socially, as well as make their bodies the representation of what is desirable and beautiful for others. The nude or sripped down bodies of the rich and famous women are used to start debates and social discourse about beauty standards, women’s place in society, and sexual liberation, and modern style trends whereas the nude body of the ‘average’ woman is inherently seen as unremarkable or shameful when revealed, or that they, as ‘average’ women, could never compete with the .
The fact that these displays produce occasional backlash that is quickly forgotten in today’s news cycle has also been integral in separating their experience from the average women’s experience. Modern cultural emperors get to outlive and are defended, in part, from the backlash by their upper class peers and fans by the creation of a dialog around them which occasionally pushes these social norms shift. They can appear nude or scantily clothed because they can literally afford to be seen in whatever light the public makes of them and their bodies without risking complete isolation or financial hardship due to the consequences of potential backlash as opposed to the average woman, who would potentially have to pay for her nudity with the loss of her career, reputation, and community.
Whereas the Emperor of the past were previously embarrassed for being seen without their finery and in the vulnerability of nudity, today, the ability to publicly and openly display and revel in one’s nakedness is a luxury only extended to the rich and famous, our modern day cultural Emperors.
