THE KING ISN'T NAKED, HE'S WEARING SLAM JAM
- Valentina Sordi
- Apr 7
- 5 min read
What’s more embarrassing for a king:
being naked or dressing like his people?
A naked king is the protagonist of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, in which a trickster tailor convinces him to parade in front of his subjects completely undressed. No one dares say a word until a child blurts out: “But the king is naked!”
Re Nudo was also the name of a magazine founded in the ‘60s, inspired by that very story, created to expose the contradictions of society—or rather, to expose its “kings,” then Christian Democrat politicians, moralists, bourgeois industrialists, and self-important professors.
But who are today’s kings—and more importantly, what do they wear?
After years of politicians in hoodies, CEOs in t-shirts, and heads of state in baseball caps, the “greats of our time” have slowly adapted their wardrobes to blend in with the masses. Often poorly. But it seems to work.
Is the entrepreneur dressing like a factory worker? Or have clothing distinctions simply disappeared altogether?
Clothing might no longer differentiate us—but privileges remain as clear-cut as ever, both socially and economically.
Anyone living here—in the broad political West, especially in cities, and above all in one city in particular: Milan—anyone working in what used to be called the service sector, the one my grandparents didn’t even know existed and that amazed my parents when they found themselves part of it—more specifically, in the fast-paced world of creative industries, fashion, design, architecture and the like, where everything was always due yesterday—knows how easy it is to mistake an intern for the boss on your first day.
There’s no real difference in how people dress (or speak, for that matter). Everyone’s obsessed with varsity jackets—even if college is a distant memory—and hoodies—even if any past protests are ancient history, if they happened at all. Especially those in positions of power. The only difference? That intern’s outfit may look the same, but it costs a quarter of the boss’s version. Sometimes. Because most of the people in this field come from privileged backgrounds—the same ones that allow them to attend schools that cost tens of thousands of euros, only to land underpaid jobs.
This false “egalitarianism” has blurred the lines between office and outside, between work and personal life, between time for work and time to live.
Sure, we’re free to wear whatever we want to the office—but we’re not free to take the work off once we clock out. Not at the bar, not at home, not even at the grocery store. I’m talking about a very specific environment—the only professional one I truly know: Milan’s creative agencies. Young, dynamic, cool, fresh, fun—and forget “professional,” that word hasn’t been in a LinkedIn job ad in years. Here, between Porta Venezia and the Navigli, the line between “private life” and “work life” is a paper thin.
As if work is no longer a part of life, but something that has completely swallowed it.
As if we needed to invent a “private life” to make up for it.
One that, let’s be honest, isn’t private at all anymore.
Not even the clothes we buy and resell immediately—before we’ve even had the chance to get tired of them, or stain them with our favorite wine, or sauce from one of those (rare), happy Sundays.
We’re not nostalgic for the days of suits from Monday to Friday and jeans on weekends, but at least those outfits gave structure to time. Weekends meant leisure, house cleaning, Saturday shopping, and for some, theatre, golf, dinner at friends-of-friends’ homes.
Now we work weekends too—wearing the same hoodie we had on Wednesday.
Gone are the days when people took to the streets simply because they noticed economic inequality in how polished someone’s shoes looked at the club:
“I used to think pointy shoes and designer sweaters were the most important thing, but at the club, there was always someone with shinier shoes and more elegant clothes.
Money was the most important thing”
(Rose e Pistole, Stefano Cappellini, Sperling & Kupfer, 2007).
Today, when clothing no longer sets us apart, how do we recognize ourselves as a collective?
How do we fight for our rights? When both boss and intern wear the same hoodie—just with different logos—no one bats an eye. If the style is the same, who cares if the price tag reflects an ocean-wide gap in purchasing power?
This mass uniformity—between those at the top and those at the bottom of the digital assembly line—inevitably erases the sense that work is something imposed on us. By society, yes. By our own ambitions, maybe. Or just by our economic reality. It’s something we give to—something we sometimes sacrifice ourselves for—and therefore, something we should demand from in return.
But we forget that quickly. Because we feel freer than our parents - happily trapped in a provincial rhythm of steady jobs and quiet lives. We certainly have more “freedom” than our peers in banks or insurance companies, where dress codes still exist. And when we see them near our office, we scoff: “I’d never do that.”
But I wonder if they, looking at us—dressed like their teenage nephews, dark circles under our eyes, MacBooks always under our arms—don’t think the exact same thing. Especially when they hear what we earn.
Because if everything around us is pretending to be an island of “equality,” then of course we’ll stay at the office longer than we should. Our entire life, undistinguished from work, ends up happening there. The office becomes a high school classroom, where the end of the shift is like recess.
There’s beer waiting in the fridge at 6 p.m., begging us to stay just an hour longer in front of the screen, even in the July heat of Milan. There’s a basketball hoop and a ping pong table, as if to say: your fun can live here too, between these same four walls.
And so it goes with our clothes, too—packages arriving every thirty minutes, little fashion shows of what we just bought on Vinted, or for the more fortunate, Vestiaire Collective.
It’s not about the hoodie, or the pants, or the sneakers. It’s about symbols. Symbols we may soon no longer know how to read. Because the collectivization of style hasn’t brought with it any kind of collectivization of the common good.
This sweatshirt-level equality isn’t social equality.
In the end, the intern will still be underpaid. The intern won’t be allowed to speak in meetings. The intern can wear whatever they want—but they still can’t decide how to do their job, or manage their time.
And when that same intern climbs the ladder and finally starts “their own thing,” they’ll repeat the exact same dynamics—unable to shed, along with the hoodie, that need to always rise, to work for the sake of working. Maybe because, in all the time between internships and that first senior title, every minute, every ambition, every friendship, every love burned away in the fire of what we now call “work life.”
THE KING ISN'T NAKED, HE'S WEARING SLAM JAM.
L'IDIOT DIGITAL
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