Should you judge a magazine by its cover? Unequivocally, yes. This is prime real estate that has the very real power to influence public opinion. To motivate. To stop you in your frenziedly-scrolling tracks. Miriam Margolyes’s viral cover shoot for British Vogue’s July issue, for instance, matters. Here, the 82-year-old actress and Instagram’s “f*** it”-fluencer poses topless. A glorious sight to behold — so rare it is that we see it.
Sure, as Julia Roberts says in Notting Hill: “They’re just breasts, every second person in the world has them…”. In some ways she’s right. Why should this supposedly innocuous female body part get any special attention? But they do. Women are still raging over the right to their own bodies. Boobs on display still cause disproportionate distress. Heck, am I causing a disturbance even writing about them?
Bizarrely, I didn’t give that question too much thought until news spread this week that Catalonian swimming pools have been told it is now discriminatory to ban women from sunbathing topless. “This is a gender equality issue: men could [go topless] and women couldn’t,” says Mariona Trabal, a spokesperson for activist group Mugrons Lliures (Free Nipples). According to a letter written by the Catalan government’s department of equality and feminism, preventing women’s right to go topless, “excludes part of the population and violated the free choice of each person with regard to their body.”
But some attitudes don’t travel well. For city dwellers, it still feels like an activity saved for anonymous sands on European beaches, where it’s seen as essentially unremarkable. I remember the first holiday I took post-pandemic with my best friend in Greece; post-swim, casually and comfortingly flinging our bikinis on loungers for what felt like the first time in years. Freedom. London (and UK beaches generally), for all its liberalism, still has a way to go. Public nudity itself is not actually illegal here — though undressing with the intention of alarming others is. In other words, if someone complains over your top-half nudity in St James’s Park, the police have the authority to tell you to cover up.
Of course, if it’s not harming anyone, sunbathing topless should be a pleasure for all who choose. The sadder reality is there are so few spaces in the capital where women genuinely feel safe to freely go topless during hot and sticky summer months. Hampstead Heath’s Ladies’ Pond is one of them, an oasis I’ve enjoyed for more than a decade, where I’d wager from June through to September that 90 per cent of attendees sunbathe without nylon spandex clinging to their hot flesh. Its surrounding meadow is a sanctuary away from prying eyes, a sweet spot free from fear of harrassment, unwanted male attention, and our bodies being sexualised.
Imagine a world where we didn’t have that fear? Where we could, just like Miriam, simply grin and bare it.
The July issue of British Vogue is available now
In other news...
When I saw headlines this morning that celebrities were “sending prayers” to Madonna, as someone with a short attention span with a predilection to catastrophise, my brain, of course, feared the worst. As of writing, this much we actually know: the US singer, 64, was struck down by a serious bacterial infection, which lead to a several day stay in an intensive care unit. She’s still under medical care, postponed tour engagements, but her health is improving and a “full recovery is expected,” according to her manager. Thank god. Madonna is, doubtlessly, one of music’s last living legends. With a hunger for reinvention over four decades, her eras are iconic. From Material Girl to Madame X, she gets the power of visual identity unlike any other. In her own words, “no matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you’ve come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.”
