Re-envisioning The Female Nude
Photography by Isabela Catão
5 minute read
The biggest trend to emerge from this season’s fashion month was an exposed baby bump, thanks to the pregnant pop star and fashion maverick Rihanna, who flaunted a series of body-hugging, flesh-revealing outfits in New York, Paris and Milan. From a bra top and hipster jeans at Gucci to a sheer black negligee dress at Dior, Rihanna’s outfits were clearly designed to accessorise, rather than minimise, her sizable bump, which she carries around as proudly as one would a newborn itself.
She’s being hailed as pushing the boundaries of maternity wear, and of challenging expectations around how women should behave during pregnancy, although I’d argue the Spice Girls did that 20-odd years ago. I remember Posh wearing her signature sexy black mini dresses and heels when carrying her first baby, Brooklyn, and Mel B, always brash and a little over-the-top, bared her bump with pride on stage and in music videos.
But the celebration of pregnant bodies is not new. Last year, an exhibition at London’s Foundling Museum called Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media looked at artists’ depiction of pregnant women over the past 500 years. As far back as the 16th and 17th centuries, pregnancy portraits were common, falling out of favour then until the late 20th century when Demi Moore’s 1991 Vanity Fair cover, on which she appeared naked and seven months pregnant, caused a cultural shift in how pregnant women expressed themselves.
Pregnant or not, youthful, fertile, cherubic female bodies have always been celebrated. In many respects, pregnant pop star Rhianna represents the cliche of the female nude, with her rounded belly, large breasts and smooth, fresh skin. I’m tired, though, of the eulogising of Rihanna. She’s an attractive 33-year-old mother-to-be who has all the advantages of money, styling, skincare and expert makeup. Of course, she looks like “the most radiant expectant mother”, as fashion critic Tim Banks described her. She’s not doing anything that Demi Moore, Victoria Beckham and Beyoncé, among others, haven’t done before her.
Although Rihanna, I imagine, considers herself something of a radical and a disrupter, I’d argue that women who display this kind of ‘ripeness’ have always been valued and celebrated by society because they subscribe to acceptable patriarchal ideas of femininity, i.e. that women are decorative and fertile. By placing so much emphasis on her bulging bump and showcasing, through that see-through negligee in particular, how pregnancy has rounded out the rest of body, isn’t she just playing to the patriarchy? You could argue it both ways, I suppose. The Grammy award-winner explained to fashion website Refinery29 that she’s “really pushing into the idea of sexy”. She’s pushing into her own idea of sexy, certainly, but it sounds a little disingenuous to me. Using the word “pushing” suggests something forced rather than natural.
Either way, Rihanna’s aesthetic slots seamlessly into the Kardashian culture of the last ten years – dramatically curvy bodies, plumped-up lips and heavily-contoured makeup – which we’ve become so desensitised to.
But what about menopausal women and post-menopausal women, who offer a radically different depiction of womanhood. How often do we see women’s ageing bodies being revered?
Dutch artist and photographer Denise Boomkens, founder of @and.bloom, an Instagram account that honours women over 40 by posting beautiful, vibrant images of them – some naked – recently explained on her feed how she’d lost followers and been reported on to the social media platform because of objections to her nude photographs. I wonder was nudity the problem or the fact that these naked bodies belonged to ageing women and exposed all of the intriguing, but usually unseen, hallmarks of childbirth, illness, gravity and natural decay?
Photograph of Karen Persson by Denise Boomkens for her site, And Bloom. Makeup by Xiu Yun.
In response to these objections, Boomkens no longer plans to post nudes to her Instagram feed, but she will include them on her website, which is good news because we need a realistic frame of reference for what older women’s bodies look like. And I’m not talking about the Hollywood elite, many of whom follow almost professional athlete-style exercise and eating regimes. Australian photographer Ponch Hawkes told The Guardian last year on the launch of her exhibition 500 Strong – Flesh After Fifty, a series of nude portraits of women over 50 around Australia, “I suspect that our image of what we ought to look like is stuck at our 28-year-old selves, which can be really self-defeating. We don’t know what other women look like either; we have nothing to illuminate the normal course of ageing.” Certainly, former supermodel Linda Evangelista’s image of herself appears to have been firmly rooted in her modelling heyday of the 1990s, leading to what sounded like fairly extreme cosmetic procedures to reverse the ‘ravages’ of time.
Hawkes is 75 years old and was concerned that there were no available images of lived-in women’s bodies. Traditionally, all we see of older women in photographs is their hands and faces. She wanted to reclaim ageing bodies from “shame” and promote the idea of normal, which is exactly what @and.bloom was striving for I imagine. Her objectors claimed “nudity is offensive and equal to pornography”, but in no way do these portraits subscribe to pornographic norms. It seems a strange argument to me, and one that I suspect is a ruse for the predictable shaming of ageing women we’ve become so used to in society. Both Hawkes’ and Boomkens’ images discard the cliche of the female nude because their visual honesty connects us directly to the woman within.
Tattoos, wrinkles, mastectomy and caesarean scars all reveal something of the life that’s been lived; they take us beyond the mere physicality of the portraits.
Beyond scars and stretch marks, these nudes also reveal the kindness, graciousness, humanity and humility that come with age. They’re portraits as well as nudes, and portraiture is about character. It’s about seeing what’s behind the subject’s eyes as much as what’s directly in front of your eyes. These images are as valuable for this reason as they are for the honesty of wobbly flesh.
In midlife, we begin to discover these virtues in a more profound way, and I imagine most of us are looking forward to leaning into them more fully with each year that passes, because this is the gift of midlife and beyond. Pregnant beauties like Rihanna may have pert boobs and a firm butt, but women in midlife and beyond have kind eyes and compassionate hearts, and this is what I love most about @and.bloom’s portraits. These women’s faces are just as compelling as their bodies.
Marie Kelly, March 2022
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