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Naturism is a lifestyle of practicing non-sexual social nudity in private and in public; the word also refers to the cultural movement which advocates and defends that lifestyle. Both may alternatively be called nudism. Though the two terms are broadly interchangeable, nudism emphasizes the practice of nudity, whilst naturism highlights an attitude favoring harmony with nature and respect for the environment, into which that practice is integrated. That said, naturists come from a range of philosophical and cultural backgrounds; there is no single naturist ideology.
Ethical or philosophical nudism has a long history, with many advocates of the benefits of enjoying nature without clothing. At the turn of the 20th century, organizations emerged to promote social nudity and to establish private Campsite and Naturist resort for that purpose. Since the 1960s, with the acceptance of public places for clothing-optional recreation, individuals who do not identify themselves as naturists or nudists have been able to casually participate in nude activities. Nude recreation opportunities vary widely around the world, from isolated places known mainly to locals through officially designated nude beaches and parks, and on to public spaces and buildings in some jurisdictions.
Many contemporary naturists and naturist organisations advocate that the practice of social nudity should not be linked with sexual activity. Some recent studies show that naturism can help grow self-esteem, and thus have a positive impact on having a well-balanced sexuality, too. For various sociocultural and historical reasons, the lay public, the media, and many contemporary naturists and their organisations have, or present, a simplified view of the relationship between naturism and sexuality. , research has begun to explore this complex relationship.
The International Naturist Federation explains:
The usage and definition of these terms varies geographically and historically. Naturism and nudism have the same meaning in the United States, but there is a clear distinction between the two terms in Great Britain.
In naturist parlance, the terms "" or "textilist" refer to non-naturist persons, behaviours or facilities (e.g. "the textile beach starts at the flag", "they are a mixed couple – he is naturist, she is textile"). "Textile" is the predominant term used in the UK ("textilist" is unknown in British naturist magazines, including H&E naturist), but some naturists avoid using this term due to perceived negative or derogatory connotations. "Textilist" is said to be used interchangeably with "textile", but no dictionary definition to this effect exists, nor are there any equivalent examples of use in mainstream literature such as those for "textile".
Facilities for naturists are classified in various ways. A landed or members' naturist club is one that owns its own facilities. Non-landed (or travel) clubs meet at various locations, such as private residences, swimming pools, hot springs, landed clubs and resorts, or rented facilities. Landed clubs can be run by members on democratic lines or by one or more owners who make the rules. In either case, they can determine membership criteria and the obligations of members. This usually involves sharing work necessary to maintain or develop the site.
The international naturist organizations were mainly composed of representatives of landed clubs. "Nudist colony" is no longer a favored term, but can be used by naturists to address landed clubs that have rigid non-inclusive membership criteria.
A holiday centre is a facility that specializes in providing apartments, chalets and camping pitches for visiting holidaymakers. A center is run commercially, and visitors are not members and have no say in the management. Most holiday centers expect visitors to hold an INF card (that is, to belong to an INF-affiliated organization), but some have relaxed this requirement, relying on the carrying of a trade card. Holiday centers vary in size. Larger holiday centres may have swimming pools, sports pitches, an entertainment program, kids' clubs, restaurants and supermarkets. Some holiday centres allow regular visitors to purchase their own chalets, and generations of the same families may visit each year. Holiday centres are more tolerant of clothing than members-only clubs; total nudity is usually compulsory in the swimming pools and may be expected on the beaches, while on the football pitches, or in the restaurants in the evening, it is rare.
[[File:Nudist couple at Terra Cotta Inn, Palm Springs, CA.JPG|thumb|Nudist couple at Terra Cotta Inn, Palm Springs, California, US]]
A naturist resort is, to a European, a private property with accommodation and facilities where naturism is the norm. Centre Helio-Marin in Vendays Montalivet, France (the first naturist resort, established in 1950); the naturist village of Charco del Palo on Lanzarote, Canary Islands; Vera Playa in Spain; and Vritomartis Resort in Greece are examples.
In US usage, a naturist resort can mean a holiday centre. Freikörperkultur (FKK)—literally translated as 'free body culture'—is the name for the general movement in Germany. The abbreviation is recognised outside of Germany and can be found on informal signs indicating the direction to a remote naturist beach.
In a survey by The Daily Telegraph, Germans and Austrians were most likely to have visited a nude beach (28%), followed by Norwegians (18%), Spaniards (17%), Australians (17%), and New Zealanders (16%). Of the nationalities surveyed, the Japanese (2%) were the least likely to have visited a nude beach. This result may indicate the lack of nude beaches in Japan; however, the Japanese are open with regard to family bathing nude at home and at (hot springs).
The Nambassa hippie festivals held in New Zealand in the late 1970s were examples of non-sexual naturism. Of the 75,000 patrons who attended the 1979 Nambassa three-day festival, an estimated 35% of attendees spontaneously chose to remove their clothing, preferring complete or partial nudity.
Some nudist festivals are held to celebrate particular days of the year, and activities may include nude bodypainting. One example is the Neptune Day Festival held in Koktebel, Crimea to depict mythological events. Another is the Festival Nudista Zipolite organized by the Federación Nudista de México (Mexican Nudist Federation) held annually since 2016 on the first weekend of February.
A few camps organize activities in the nude, such as oil wrestling by camp Gymnasium.
The first known use of the word naturisme occurred in 1778. A French-speaking Belgian, Jean Baptiste Luc Planchon (1734–1781), used the term to advocate nudism as a means of improving the hygiène de vie or healthy living.
The earliest known naturist club in the western sense of the word was established in British India in 1891. The Fellowship of the Naked Trust was founded by Charles Edward Gordon Crawford, a widower who was a District and Sessions Judge for the Bombay Civil Service. The commune was based in Matheran and had just three members at the beginning: Crawford and two sons of an Anglican missionary, Andrew and Kellogg Calderwood. The commune fell apart when Crawford was transferred to Ratnagiri; he died soon after in 1894.
In 1902, a series of philosophical papers was published in Germany by Dr. Heinrich Pudor under the pseudonym Heinrich Scham, who coined the term Nacktkultur (Nude Culture). In 1906, he wrote a three-volume treatise with this term as its title, which discussed the benefits of nudity in co-education and advocated participating in sports while being free of cumbersome clothing. Richard Ungewitter ( Nacktheit, 1906, Nackt, 1908, etc.) proposed that combining physical fitness, sunlight, and fresh-air bathing with the nudist philosophy contributed to mental and psychological fitness, good health, and an improved moral-life view. Major promoters of these ideas included Adolf Koch and , who was an instructor and manager at the German Army School of Military Physical Education in Wünsdorf. Germany published the first journal of nudism from 1902 to 1932, during which time it evolved and became known as Freikörperkultur (FKK), the free body culture movement.
The wide publication of those papers, and others, contributed to an explosive worldwide growth of nudism in which nudists participated in various social, recreational, and physical fitness activities in the nude. The first organized club for nudists on a large scale, Freilichtpark (Open-Air Park), was opened near Hamburg in 1903 by Paul Zimmerman. In 1919, German doctor Kurt Huldschinsky discovered that exposure to sunlight helped to cure rickets in many children, causing sunlight to be associated with improved health.
In France in the early 20th century, the brothers Gaston Durville and André Durville, both physicians, studied the effects of psychology, nutrition, and environment on health and healing. They became convinced of the importance of natural foods and the natural environment on human well-being and health. They named this concept naturisme. The profound effect of clean air and sunlight on human bodies became evident to them and so nudity became a part of their naturism.
Naturism became a more widespread phenomenon in the 1920s in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and other European countries and spread to the United States, where it became established in the 1930s. In Brazil, nudist magazines were already published in the 1930. In mid 50s, there were several of such publications and some editors were persecuted by police and sued by authorities under the charge of "indecent exposure".
By 1951, the various national federations united to form the International Naturist Federation. Some naturists preferred not to join clubs, and after 1945, pressure arose to designate beaches for naturist use. From the middle of the 20th century, with changing leisure patterns, commercial organisations began opening holiday resorts to attract naturists who expected the same – or better – standards of comfort and amenity offered to non-naturists. More recently, naturist holiday options have expanded to include cruises.
In the early 21st century, many organised clubs saw a decline in attendance by young people, which worried many naturists about the future of the movement. The clubs' aging memberships may have put younger people off. A rise in social conservatism, re-asserting a nudity taboo, also may have contributed to the decline. However, since tolerance for nudity in general is increasing over time, and is higher among younger generations, an alternative hypothesis is that younger naturists no longer feel they need to join a club or visit a resort in order to practise naturism. Active recruitment of younger members is being pursued by some organisations. The phenomenon varies by country, with, for example, naturism in France experiencing steady growth in a younger demographic during the 2010s. A similar trend is seen in Germany, with young people eager to depart from social norms and beauty standards.
Many films and published materials in the middle decades of the 20th century were presented as documentaries of the naturist lifestyle. In fact this was largely a pretext to exploit a loophole in censorship laws restricting the exhibition of nudity. Additionally, child pornography has been distributed under the guise of naturist media. Precisely defining the distinction has proved challenging for law enforcers, as it depends on the subjective question of whether the purpose of the production is sexual. Court cases attempting to differentiate naturist publications from pornography reach back almost a century.
Drs. André and Gaston Durville bought on the Île du Levant where they established the village of Héliopolis, which was open to the public. In 1925, Dr. François Fougerat de David de Lastours wrote a thesis on heliotherapy, and in that year, he opened the Club gymnique de France. In 1936, the naturist movement was officially recognised.
Albert and Christine Lecocq were active members of many of these clubs, but they left after disagreements, and in 1944, they founded the Club du Soleil with members in 84 cities. Four years later, they founded the (FFN); in 1949, they started the magazine Vie au Soleil, and in 1950, they opened the CHM Montalivet, the world's first naturist holiday centre, where the INF was formed.
Henri Zisly was another prominent figure and primitivist in the French naturism movement who wrote on a return to lifestyles based on self-sufficiency. (2025). 9781405198073, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 9781405198073
Nacktkultur, a term coined in 1903 by Heinrich Pudor, connected nudity, vegetarianism and social reform, and was practised in a network of 200 members clubs. The movement gained prominence in the 1920s by offering a health-giving lifestyle with Utopian ideals. Germany published the first naturist journal from 1902 to 1932, but it became politicised by radical socialists who believed it would lead to classlessness and a breakdown of society. It eventually became associated with pacificism.
In 1926, Adolf Koch established a school of naturism in Berlin, encouraging a mixing of the sexes, open air exercises, and a programme of "sexual hygiene". In 1929 the Berlin school hosted the first International Congress on Nudity.
After World War II, East Germany were free to practice naturism, chiefly at beaches rather than clubs (private organizations were regarded as potentially subversive). Naturism became a large element in DDR politics. The Proletarische Freikörperkulturbewegung subsection of the Workers Sports Organisation had 60,000 members. Since reunification there are many clubs, parks and beaches open to naturists, though nudity has become less common in the former eastern zone. Germans are typically the most commonly seen visitors at nude beaches in France and around Europe.
Toplessness also is widely practiced by locals and tourists alike as there are no cultural taboos against it.
In 2015, a court in Thessaloniki, Greece's second largest city, acquitted nudist activists who were charged for wandering naked in the city as part of their activist actions for promoting the urban nudism. In its ruling, the court deemed these acts to be "not lewd or lascivious", and vindicated the activists, thus recognizing their right to be naked publicly.
Female toplessness is allowed, in a nonsexual context, in all the beaches of the country. On March 20, 2000, the Supreme Court of Cassation through sentence No. 3557 has determined that the exposure of the nude female breast since some decades is considered a "commonly accepted behavior" and therefore has "entered into the social custom". Since then, local government regulations forbidding toplessness are extremely rare.
In general, Dutch people are very tolerant of beach nudity, as long as it does not impact others, or involve inappropriate staring or sexual behaviour. Topless sunbathing is permitted on most beaches except where prohibited by signage.
Research was done on the island of Menorca, where naturism is practiced at small, isolated beaches apart from the island's developed resorts. Not everyone on these beaches, even within a group, is nude, and both types of participants were interviewed. Most were white heterosexuals between the ages of 25 and 40 who live in cities such as Madrid or Barcelona. For them, being nude on a beach is about bodily sensations of sun, sea, and sand directly on the skin, not about cultural meanings or performance of bodily appearance. The behaviors that support the non-sexual definition of the situation work by downplaying the visual, most of all by not staring at others. It is also unacceptable for a person to actively seek the gaze of others. Naturists may see the decision not to be nude is holding on to the visual, and non-naturists may see beach nudity as a form of exhibitionism.
Legal provisions regarding partial nudity (or toplessness) are analogous to those regarding full nudity, but social tolerance towards toplessness is higher. The law does not require women to cover their breasts in public swimming, or on any beach in Spain. The governments of the municipalities of Galdakao and L'Ametlla del Vallès legalized female toplessness on their public pools in March 2016 and June 2018, respectively.
Naturists were a prominent affinity group among Spanish anarcho-syndicalists.
By 1943, there were a number of "sun clubs", and together they formed the British Sun Bathers Association, or BSBA. In 1954, a group of clubs unhappy with the way the BSBA was being run, split to form the Federation of British Sun Clubs, or FBSC. In 1961, the BSBA Annual Conference agreed that the term nudist was inappropriate and should be discarded in favour of naturist. The two organisations rivalled each other before eventually coming together again in 1964 as the Central Council for British Naturism, or CCBN. This organisational structure has remained much the same but it is called British Naturism or BN.
The first official nude beach was opened at Fairlight Glen in Covehurst Bay near Hastings in 1978 (not to be confused with Fairlight Cove, which is to the east), followed later by the beaches at Brighton and Fraisthorpe. Bridlington opened in April 1980.
Outside formal naturist organizations, social nudity is practised in a variety of contexts in New Zealand culture. It is a feature of many summer music festivals, including Convergence, Kiwiburn, Luminate, Rhythm & Vines, and Splore, in a tradition going back to Nambassa in the late 1970s. It is also associated with the culture of Rugby football, most prominently in the nude rugby match held in Dunedin each winter from 2002 to 2014 (and sporadically thereafter) as pre-match entertainment for the first professional rugby game of the season, and in the mock public holiday "National Nude Day", an event in which viewers of the talk show SportsCafe were invited – chiefly by former rugby player Marc Ellis, the show's most irrepressibly comic presenter – to send in photos and video of themselves performing daily activities in the nude.
While a large proportion of New Zealanders are tolerant of nudity, especially on beaches, there remains a contingent who consider it obscene. Naturists who engage in casual public nudity, even in places where this is lawful, risk being reported to police by disapproving people. Legally, nudity is permissible on any beach where it is "known to occur", in consequence of which New Zealand has no official nude beaches. The indecent exposure provision of the Summary Offences Act is, in practice, reserved for cases of public sexual gratification, but public nudity may still be prosecuted under the "offensive behaviour" provision.
Canadians who served in the military during the Second World War met like-minded souls from across the country, and often visited clubs while in Europe. They were a ready pool of recruits for post-war organizers. A few years later, the wave of post-war immigration brought many Europeans with their own extensive experience, and they not only swelled the ranks of membership, but often formed their own clubs, helping to expand nudism from coast to coast.
Most clubs eventually united in the Canadian Sunbathing Association, which affiliated with the American Sunbathing Association in 1954. Several disagreements between eastern and western members of the CSA resulted in its division into the Western Canadian Sunbathing Association (WCSA) and the Eastern Canadian Sunbathing Association (ECSA) in 1960. The ECSA endured much in-fighting over the next fifteen years, which led to its official demise in 1978. The WCSA changed its name to the American Association for Nude Recreation – Western Canadian Region, a region of the American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR), which itself was formerly known as the ASA.
In 1977 the Fédération québécoise de naturisme (FQN) was founded in Quebec by Michel Vaïs, who had experienced European naturism at Montalivet. In 1985 the Federation of Canadian Naturists (FCN) was formed with the support of the FQN. In 1988 the FQN and FCN formed the FQN-FCN Union as the official Canadian representative in the International Naturist Federation.
, Playa Zipolite is Mexico's first and only legal public nude beach. A free beach and unofficially nudist for more than 50 years, this beach is reputed to be the best place for nudism in the country. The numerous nude sunbathers, and the long tradition, make it safe for nudism and naturism. Annually since 2016, on the first weekend of February, Zipolite has hosted Festival Nudista Zipolite that in 2019 attracted 7,000–8,000 visitors.
The American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR) is the national naturist organization. Arnd Krüger compared nudists in Germany and the United States and came to the conclusion that in Germany the racial aspects (Zuchtwahl) were important for the breakthrough (e.g. the Commanding General of the Army served as patron for nudists events), while in the U.S. nudism was far more commercial and had thus more difficulties.
In 2008, Florida Young Naturists held its first Naked Bash, which has been repeated multiple times per year and has grown into one of the larger young naturist gatherings in the world.
In 2009, a campaign to promote nudism in the United States occurred with an effort by the AANR to record the largest simultaneous skinny dip at several U.S. clubs and beaches, which occurred on July 11 of that year.
In 2010, an organization formed called Young Naturists America, which was mostly focused on the younger generation, as well as social issues, such as body image. Young Naturists and Nudists America closed in 2017.
Indonesia has an underground naturist community who defy the laws against public nudity.
Since 2020 during the worldwide pandemic, Lemon Tree Resort in Phuket, Oriental Village in Chiangmai, and Phuan Naturist Village in Pattaya have closed.
Dragonfly Naturist Village in Pattaya (a member of American Association for Nude Recreation) has opened and expanded its property as the largest naturist resort in Thailand.
Magazines in the second and, occasionally, third groups feature naturist editorial and advertising. While some naturists argue over which magazines belong in which of these categories, these views may change as publishers and editors change. Many clubs and groups have benefited from magazines which, while not exclusively or even predominantly naturist in character, made naturist information available to many who would not otherwise have been aware of it. The information and advertising provided online, along with the wide availability of free online pornography, has meant the disappearance of old-style "skin" magazines presenting significant glamour content masquerading as, or alongside, naturist content. Naturist magazines have to appeal strongly to naturists to succeed; they cannot sit on the fence between naturism and glamour. Some naturists feel that the worthwhile editorial content in some magazines is not a fair balance for the disapproved-of photographic content.
Some naturist clubs have been willing to allow filming by the media on their grounds, though content that proved not to be of genuine naturism can end up being parodied by the media.
Some commercial 'naturist' DVDs are dominated by imagery of naked children. Such material can be marketed in ways that appear to appeal directly to pedophile inclinations, and ownership of these DVDs (and their earlier video cassette incarnations) has resulted in successful British prosecutions for possession of indecent images of children. One case was appealed, unsuccessfully, to the European Court of Human Rights.
Photo shoots, including major high-profile works by Spencer Tunick, are done in public places including beaches.
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