The neglected history of male nudity From Yves Saint Laurent's full nudity to Vivienne Westwood's phallic necklaces

It was 1980 when Paul Schrader wrote a piece of film history with American Gigolo. The young and inexperienced Richard Gere was the only actor who agreed to direct the first male frontal nude in Hollywood history, after a number of more established colleagues had cautiously declined. Playing a prostitute consecrated Gere as a sex symbol, while those few seconds of full nudity became emblematic of a practise that to this day remains uncommon compared to full-frontal female nudity. From Rick Owens' scandalous catwalk in 2015, an apocalyptic reimagining of Carlo Vanzina's Sotto al vestito niente, to Isamaya Ffrench's 'phallic lipsticks' with her Lips collection, taking us through the subversive world of advertising campaigns: like cinema, fashion has often made the celebration of the body a recurring trope, almost obsessive for some stylists. To celebrate Valentine's Day, we take a look back at an unjustly neglected subject, the complete male nude in the history of fashion.

Phallic shapes on the catwalk

During his tenure at Gucci, Tom Ford transformed the brand into a symbol of sexy luxury, with models constantly walking around in thongs and campaigns that flirted on the edge of pornography. The designer rightly applied the same ethos to menswear, entrusting the FW01 campaign to photographer Terry Richardson. The result is a striking image that has rightly gone down in the list of the most talked-about campaigns in history: a tattooed model clutching the end of his logo belt as if it were his limb. Richardson continued the tongue-in-cheek campaigns by teaming up with Sisley in 2001. The shots show model Josie Maran ingesting milk directly from a cow's udder. The 2002 Yves Saint Laurent commercial was the brand's first spot to feature male nudity. The poses of Samuel de Cubber were reminiscent of Saint Laurent's own nude shots from 1971. The ad was created under the creative direction of Tom Ford: «Perfume is worn on the skin - Ford explained in a press release at the time - so why hide the body?». The following decade was full of sex-centric imagery, from Calvin Klein to Diesel, but for a new example of the desecration of male nudity in skin, we had to wait for SS17 by Eckhaus Latta and his images of real couples having sex, appropriately pixelated. The campaign, photographed by Heji Shin, underlined how clothing - or the lack of it - marks the most personal moments in a person's life.