The Emperor's New Clothes.

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

In this confectioner's edition of the story, however, Karl Lagerfeld sets the vain emperor back onto his tottering feet with urbane and splendidly insouciant illustrations that evoke the bustle and the insipidities of courtly life around the turn of the 18th century, even as they recall Warhol's 1950s commercial work. Lagerfeld's Emperor suggests 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, modern antiheroes, like Scapino or Figaro. They are perhaps destined for future triumphs, as Kaiser Karl. And the poor monarch, rather like today's couture customer, can but pay to keep up.

This book really announces itself as a present. There's gold in the printing, silk in the binding. It comes in a peek-a-boo slipjacket, permitting a glimpse of the emperor's big hair avant la lettre. Inside, amidst much else, there's a great keyhole view of imperial buttocks. But best of all is the tiny pair of gold scissors dangling at the end of a skinny red ribbon: the bookmark and symbol of success.