Rankin Elevates Nudity in Fashion Editorial

New Eroticism, a more female-centric approach to fashion nudity, is in full bloom. I’ve tracked the topic for years now, but 2010 is the year that nudity in fashion editorial is widespread. It’s fair to ask how a magazine sells clothes, fragrance and accessories from women wearing no clothes. Call it branding.

If pornography is struggling making money, nudity may help fashion lifestyle magazines by upscaling the experience.

While I detest the photographs of Terry Richardson, because they reduce women to cheap thrill p-rn stars, I love the new Rankin photos for S Magazine. The editorial called ‘Hunger’ focuses on a couple and the exploration of desire. While the photos aren’t adult, they come as close as I’ve seen in fashion media.

It’s worth noting that Anne of Carversville traffic was growing 20-30% a month before I decided to stop being a hypocrite and move the Sexy Futures content here. We’ll meet, perhaps exceed, our goal of 150,000 page views this month — and the website has a long page! (Note: Google Images took care of that. All racy content has returned to SF, which is now renamed Sensuality News.)

Our average visit is running over 70 minutes, although I believe we’re set as a home page, and the session just times out. What is very clear to me is that the reader path isn’t only into Private Studio and out again. The erotic photography interests people, but so far is rarely more than two of the top 10 reads.

Totally amazing is the fact that I haven’t had one complaint, which I find a staggering fact, given the range of material on the website and our following in Muslim countries. Update: It’s irrelelvant because we lost our unfiltered rating.

Saving coral reefs, feminism, dolphin intelligence, and microfinance in India coexist with sensual photography, confirming the assumption of the style setters who are taking risks in this new direction. Anne