Meaning
A case in which almost everyone praises or accepts something worthless, false, or even nonexistent, because nobody dares admit they cannot see its supposed value for fear of looking stupid or of defying the crowd. An allusion used to expose collective pretence, pointedly applied to management fads, official policy, fashion, and art. Bookish but widely understood allusion; confrontational, since it calls an entire consensus deluded. Regional use: General English (from a Danish literary tale).
Origin
From Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale Kejserens nye Klaeder, published in Copenhagen on 7 April 1837 by C. A. Reitzel as the third booklet of Fairy Tales Told for Children. In it, swindlers weave a cloth said to be invisible to anyone unfit for office or hopelessly stupid, and only a child's cry that the emperor has nothing on breaks the pretence. Andersen did not invent the plot: he knew it through a German translation of a tale in El Conde Lucanor, written around 1335 by the Spanish nobleman Don Juan Manuel, in which the cloth is invisible to any man not the son of his presumed father; Andersen's shift to stupidity redirected the story at intellectual vanity. An Indian analogue of 1283 is also recorded. English use of the title as shorthand for collective delusion grew from the tale's translations.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- the emperor has no clothes
- the emperor wears no clothes
- the emperor's new clothes moment
- the Emperor's new suit
Usage Examples
- The keynote promised an AI revolution, but by the third demo it felt like the emperor's new clothes.
- Only the junior auditor was willing to say the emperor had no clothes and call the reserves overstated.
- Critics finally treated the gallery's celebrated poster collection as the emperor's new clothes once the forgery scandal broke.