Coming up in her career,Cindy Crawfordwas branded as the all-American girl next door. She rebelled against this reputation when she decided to pose nude forPlayboymagazine in 1988 — a controversial choice that also ended up launching her to even greater heights of success.
In 1988, she was asked to doPlayboyand, she says, “Everyone in my life at the time thought I shouldn’t doPlayboy. My modeling agency didn’t feel that that fit into the types of jobs I should be doing. I think the brand still had a connotation to it that maybe scared some people off.”
The supermodel goes on to share that while she “understood the platform of Playboy and what that symbolized” and that posing for the magazine “was definitely outside the normal trajectory for aVoguemodel at the time,” she still felt drawn to the project.
“I don’t know, there was just something about it that intrigued me. So against the advice of my agents, I said ‘yes.'”
It certainly helped that the offer to do the shoot came through Herb Ritts, the famed fashion photographer.
“Herb Ritts was someone that I worked with a lot,” Crawford says. “I stayed at his house and we were very good friends.”
She also stipulated to the publication that they didn’t need to pay her a lot to do it, “as long as I can have control of the images and I wanted the right to kill the story if I don’t like it.”
“Herb and I combined it with another trip that we were doing for FrenchVogueto Hawaii. We’d shoot a picture for FrenchVogueand then we’d shoot a picture forPlayboy,” she says in the doc. “I mean, you almost couldn’t tell which pictures were for FrenchVogueand which pictures were forPlayboy, it was very organic and I loved them.”
She concludes, “That’s the whole thing for me is, even if I make choices that other people disagree with or don’t like, if they’re my decisions and I have control of it, that’s empowering to me. Even if it’s doingPlayboy. I never felt like a victim of that decision.”
Besides as Crawford and her fellow supers point out, nudity is very much something baked into their business and in most situations they often have far less or no control over how their body is portrayed.
Looking through a book featuring nude photos of herself, Naomi Campbell explains, “I don’t feel like when I’m nude that I’m nude. It really depends who I’m shooting for. I could feel totally clothed. It’s the concept and the way when it’s tastefully done that you don’t feel like you’re nude.”
She continues, “It might have made people think, ‘Oh, she really feels comfortable in her skin.’ Not necessarily, I didn’t. Just because I was not thinking of me Naomi showing myself, I felt I was in some other character…I felt dressed, if you can believe that.”
Christy Turlington adds, “I respect and admire people who can be comfortable in their bodies and comfortable naked. If I’m working with somebody that I trust and I have respect for and I understand their vision, then I can take some risks. If I can trust that person capturing it and I know what they see and I know that my comfort is going to make that image that much more exciting, interesting, whatever, then I can go there. But if that trust isn’t there and there’s this sense of, well, you know, ‘Go. Do it. You do your thing, I’m going to capture it,’ I can’t do that. I can’t just do all the things that take time and trust for any camera.”
The model adds, “I had no training in broadcasting. It was bringing together music and fashion and pop culture and putting it into a mixing bowl and we didn’t really care what came out.”
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“It gave me an opportunity to talk and I was able to bring a little bit more of myself to my public persona,” she shares. “That all felt very empowering to me.”
source: people.com
