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This is the 2nd in a possible series of window displays (the first one is here).
In this window run, the fable of Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes is depicted against the city of Paris. Paris was chosen for its dominant and influential role in the fashion industry, while the specific buildings are (from left to right) the Panthéon, Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the Moulin Rouge, and Notre Dame Cathedral. They are in orthographic drawings in elevation and section, giving the viewer glimpses of the interior and exterior, as if the gathering crowds are winding through all layers of the city, past each genius loci (as Aldo Rossi had coined) of the city of lights. With ubiquitous brand identities imposed on all public spaces of today, the city itself becomes part of the brand's added value (New York, Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo!). It is a part of the litany of luxury pilgrimages. The inflated figures of the very proud and very naked king and his minions carrying his non-existent cape parading amongst the people refer to the perceived power difference of the power dynamic between the makers of taste and the masses. But this power is in no way despotic as the people notice but are not enchanted by the myth of his "new clothes". If anything, he is the latest fashion victim, because the system of luxury is perversely based on "the new even before producing it and so accomplishes that paradox in which the ‘new’ is both unpredictable and yet already decreed." (Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, 117)
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