Behind the Seams: Nudity at Fashion Week, and how we write about it

With the passing of recent fashion weeks, there's been a definitive upsurge in nudity on the runways and, with it, an increased volume of news sources "writing" about fashion as though they have a clue what fashion is. These articles, however, do clarify how the function of fashion as a genuine artform is obscured from us and converted into a pornographic display of bodies (as fashion's function is to present the female body in an attractive light to a male audience). 

For example, the New York Daily News, writing on 'The naked runway: the most outrageous non-clothing fashion designs', wins the medal for most thinly veiled excuse to exhibit pictures of half-naked runway models in history. In an attempt to make this "newsworthy", one of the captions, in absolute shock and horror, explains that 'at Lingerie London, racy designs ruled the catwalk'. At Lingerie London models wore lingerie. Sexy lingerie. Who'd have thought. 

For all this faux shock is funny, the article is a fairly sinister attempt to turn fashion away from an artistic process (which, sometimes arguably, it is) into a) a purely commercial enterprise, designed to keep the wheels turning on the self-perpetuating cycles of social media sharing, useless news hype, and more of the same on the runway next year and b) into an excuse for men to objectify women, as fashion becomes framed as the means by which women display themselves for consumption by others.

Manish Arora

And this isn't even the worst example of a deliberate misreading of a styling or design choice in the article, though it is the silliest. When discussing this Manish Arora piece, pictured right, the piece says

'Good thing that model is wearing bright green eyeshadow, otherwise we'd all be staring directly at her chest. Hey, it's not our fault - the Manish Arora piece points directly at her breasts!' 

I'm not sure where to begin unpicking this, except that they've blatantly missed the point of the garment. Though the style lines of the garment draw the eye to the chest, not much is visible through the garment itself. Similarly, the chosen style of the weave and the tall structuring of the garment at the neck and shoulders suggests a kind of body armour, evoking a push-pull effect between giving us access to the body and restricting that access at the same time. The captioning of this image, alongside the others, reduces the thematic or metaphoric communication happening in each garment to transform the image, and the design overall, into soft pornography.

As noted above, these compilation articles of designers utilising nudity or some other configuration of fashion that shows the naked body fail to give any analysis of the actual trend, or even of any sense of a designer's process. Instead, as stated, these articles simply create a source for the consumption of women's bodies, and present fashion as the means by which women present themselves to such an audience (rather than as, say, the act of dressing as artistic engagement, or a simple fact of existence). 

As stated, there is also a commercial necessity to fashion, which these tabloids are an integral part of. For example, The Daily Beast, in a...tastefully titled but still engaged article 'Nipples and Nudity: Why Was There So Much Flesh at New York Fashion Week?', highlights a link between this recent phenomena and less highbrow celebrity culture. With social media stars and the Kardashians on every screen we own at every last second of every single day, this comes with an increased demand for designers to compromise their work to boost sales through these lucrative new advertising sources. The article suggests that 'starlets have increasingly been requesting sexy red carpet looks, which may explain why Marchesa—[amongst others]—sexed up their collection this year'. 

It's evident that fashion does require some sort of commercial success in order to sustain itself as an industry and to continue to advance as an artistic form. Fashion is, after all, an artform dependent on commerce to survive. As such, a lot of the nudity and such at fashion shows are only a partial demonstration of what fashion can do, and what fashion is for. The article mentioned above goes on to highlight that the appetites of current celebrities for sheer gowns and barely there clothes stems from the big fashion events that are posted across social media, namely the Oscars and the Met Gala. 

For fashion to sustain itself, it participates in these cycles of mutual promotion with other institutions just as desperate for page views and social media lip service as it is itself. This produces a similar degradation of fashion as artistic form as news media tends to also do.

Backstage at Nicholas Nybro SS18,
Copenhagen Fashion Week

But fashion can also be a more politically and socially engaged beast, even when tabloid writing reduces it's performative artistic elements down to a sexual display for a broadly male audience. At Copenhagen Fashion Week this year, Nicholas Nybro's SS18 show featured next to no clothes, displayed on a wide range of models. Set in a room filled with classical statues, the clothes that were featured evoked precisely the draped pieces worn by the statues, or otherwise played with body shapes and organic forms - Nybro himself correlates the drapery of the dresses with the sagging of skin as we age, for example. The highlight, however, were the models who bravely strutted down the runway completely nude.

Nybro describes the collection as a 'tribute to the human body and it’s thousands different ways of looking', which seeks to interrogate the 'ideal' body fashion is promoting. It's worth reading his full artist's statement, linked here, to fully appreciate the collection. It seems many journalists, however, decided not to read his artist's statement, instead choosing to wilfully misinterpret the show as shock tactics rather than something akin to performance art. 

The New York Post writes

'After all, what takes more effort: Exposing your models to the elements for shock factor, or actually, you know, making a garment?'

First of all, the models were hardly exposed to the elements, as the show occurred indoors in a well-packed room full of lights, cameras, and important people from the fashion industry. More often than not, these places aren't cold enough. Secondly, garments were made - what kind of businessman would Nybro have to be to stage a show with nothing to sell? Regardless, the article wishes to deceive the reader into thinking this is some wacky nonsense, rather than a nuanced and artistic presentation of clothing.

The article goes on to demand that Nybro, instead of making strange "art", should be making clothes that fit all women, something they cite as a flaw in the fashion industry (correctly, too!). Funnily enough, Nybro addresses such concerns in his artistic statement, citing that

'It’s tiresome to say that fashion only presents itself nicely on tall, skinny models – if that’s the case then isn’t something very wrong with the clothes?'

Of course, news sources like this don't really care about what these designers have to say, or want to convey through their work. Instead, once again the work here is a reductionist approach to fashion - fashion as commerce and sexualisation, rather than art. It's certain the Nybro is not sexualising the models, nor turning them into a covetable commodity - rather the bodies on his catwalk are just bodies, bodies which belong to individuals, and bodies that will grow, change and age, just like everyone else. And this is precisely what reporters seem to find so repugnant. Bodies must be sexually appealing, for financial reasons, and never just bodies.

As a wonderful Guardian commenter, Skinz, puts it:

I suspect Skinz means this in a literal way, and not as an insightful philosophical and social observation. 

Maybe this is what Rick Owens was poking fun at when he showed a penis-flashing collection for his AW15 show? That men are always putting their penises out in the public arena, whether it's appropriate or not.