Apr

Victorian gentlemen, rustled and bustled at by ladies in swathes of outer material and nether armor, paid handsome prices for paintings of unclad women in voluptuous tangles, with titles like A Nude Woman or Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm, and a barroom without a nude was naked indeed. But today the naked lady--or bits and pieces of her--is filling the advertising columns and editorial pages of the fashion magazines, general magazines and even family newspapers.

Fresh from the bath, bending callipygously to dry her toes, she sells bath oil. Back turned and naked from the waist, she demonstrates on a scale how little her sweater weighs when she puts it on. A disembodied set of naked legs cut off at the pelvis can be either a wonderfully sheer pair of stockings or somebody's erotic dream walking, and a model chosen for the most beautiful navel on Photographers' Row provides a giant closeup of her specialty to demonstrate the proper distance between a sweater and a pair of slacks.

Photographers find the new ads a highly specialized art form. Because the ads must appeal to women, the model must be healthily sexy but not voluptuous or wanton. Then the trick is to determine to a micrometer the line between tasteful appeal and tasteless eroticism. Photographers spend hours adjusting a fan to blow a bit of drapery across a bare breast at just the crucial angle, contrive ingenious arm arrangements in contortions few females would be likely to assume, vie with each other to find props (a white cat, a shower curtain) that will generally obscure what is being specifically suggested.

Advertising art directors go through periods of agonizing reappraisals, debating whether this curve should be airbrushed out, that shadow deepened into greater obscurity.

If the original Peeping Tom had had a Rolleiflex with him that day in Coventry, Lady Godiva might have made the grade in a modern hair-rinse ad. But, come to think of it, the agency boys would probably have asked her to run through it again -- a little less covered up.

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