“But the king is naked!” yells the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. The boy who sees the king marching proudly in procession under…

“But the king is naked!” yells the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. The boy who sees the king marching proudly in procession under his splendid canopy, completely naked, clad only in the stupidity and hypocrisy with which power and its minions are so swollen. Driven by the same prodigious recklessness as the child in the fairy tale, the magazine Re Nudo, launched in Milan in 1970, became one of the best-known and most significant forms of Italian protest and counterculture of the era. Its founder, Andrea Majid Valcarenghi, said that their aim was to share the wonderful, the dimension of enchantment and self-discovery. If politics was in charge of the eight hours spent in the factory, the Re Nudo team would take care of the remaining sixteen: free time. Today, we are all victims of a magical fabric. We are equipped with tools that should make everything more accessible and connected and yet we too find ourselves clad in stupidity. Today, our free time feels anything but free.