Things change, things remain the same. Nudity, sex, fashion: somehow it’s a triangle that these days fails to stand up without all three sides. That’s true for magazines like Purple Fashion, a magazine that often has just as much skin as fashion but that has the latter word in its title – leaving no doubt of what it considers itself to be. Purple fashion.
So what’s the continued justification here? What makes a Terry Richardson shoot of a full-frontal nude Camille Rowe, peddling sex instead of clothing, relevant to fashion? What makes it any different to a shoot in the kind of magazine aimed purely at men and stacked on the top shelves of service stations?
The difference is in who the fashionable girl wants to be when she takes off the clothes. While a sweeping generalisation, the short of this theory is this: the same audience who dreams of having the latest luxury products also dreams of having the sex appeal of a Camille Rowe. The likes of Purple can do a shoot with barely any product because they’re selling something else, something invisibly tied to the fantasy of the fashion world. And as long as it works for them, nudity and fashion will be intimate bedfellows.
As you will have already gathered, the photos of Camille Rowe in Purple’s 17th issue are really very NSFW. You can view them at the thumbnails above.
