Guy Bourdin, Naked? or Nude?

As part of our fashion education, reading John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’ is a good way to understand how the fashion industry as authorized media prescribes the gender and beauty standards. Since we have to present chapter 2 coming friday, here’s a little preview for the students of what it is about. Nakedness vs Nudeness, an ongoing discussion about the spectator and submissive role women play in this society to please the man in Western tradition.

Watch this little video of BBC. Do you agree with Berger?

Nakedness is created in the mind of the beholder.

As early as God created the world and blamed Eve to eat the apple, Adam and Eve became aware of the spectator looking at them and covered themselves with fig leaves; it was then that nakedness was born. Nudeness however, according to Berger, is to be seen naked by the spectator, whereas nakedness reveals itself.

Adam and Eva by Mabuse

This would imply that all the pictures of naked women we see are nudes, since we, as the male spectator (whether you’re female or not) look at it and it is displayed in front of our eyes. The only thing that can be naked is when we look at ourselves naked, without mirror. Without clothes and disguise we look at our own body without thinking of it as an object. As Berger puts it ‘To be naked is to be oneself’.

February Cover Vanity Fair. Naked or Nude?

Chrystal Renn by Tom Ford, Vogue Paris. Naked or nude?