So why should going naked be such a big deal? Historians disagree on when humans first started wearing clothes – 100,000 years ago seems a reasonable guess – but broadly concur that, for 99 per cent of our time on Earth, nudity has been the norm, and that dressing for the sake of decency is an almost wholly modern phenomenon.

In the West, it wasn’t until the early Christian moralists began to make an association between nudity and sin that the big cover-up began. “The naked body,” wrote the art historian and author Kenneth Clark, “ceased to be a mirror of divine perfection and became, instead, an object of humiliation.”

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/11007686/Why-were-now-so-prudish-about-nudity.html