Fashion has always toyed with sexuality. Isn't it the prerogative of fashion to better expose what it is hiding ? We dress to keep warm, but also dress to seduce. That often means to put forward our most seducing features. Fashion has always use gimmicks and tricks to enhance their seducing ability. Not of the very least, models have been their most powerful weapons. Using already desirable women makes the clothes even more desirable. Women of impeccable magnitude wearing feature enhancing garment. What could be better ?

Enters the photographer. Constrain to making an extreme statement in one frame, locked in the glossy pages of a magazine, he has to use all weapons at his disposal.

Light, of course, is one of his most potent tool. Exposing and enhancing how light gently caresses the perfectly crafted fabric against the curves of a beautiful body is what they are paid to do. However, pushing skin outside of garment could hurt. Thus, very often, and even if it wasn't the sign of the cloth, skin becomes exposed. After all, doesn't skin retain the strongest sex appeal. And of all the part of the female body, there is probably nothing more appealing than a breast.

It is certainly not the prerogative of the photographers. How many times do we see " wardrobe incidents" on a runway, a delicate nipple appearing surreptitiously ? However, fashion photographers seem to have used the unveiling nipple more than anyone else in the industry, apart maybe car calendar photographers. It is guaranteed to make any garment sexier as well as make the photo session more interesting.

Website thefashiontit.com has taken upon itself to collect every fashion image that shows a, well, a tit. Not two. Just one. The result is a fabulous collection of great and not so great fashion photography that all have in common their exposure of the nipple. Never regrouped under one location before, these photographs look like they belong to their own secret school of photography, with its hidden rules and code of conduct. In some countries, probably most, including the USA, these images would never get published. The Fashiontit, thankfully, ignores the puritans and liberates the flesh.

Paul Melcher
paul.melcher@lalettredelaphotographie.com