Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2016: Heidi Klum

(Photo Heidi Klum by Norman Jean Roy for Allure Magazine)
Sounds familiar? Yes, Heidi Klum was my Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2011 http://thenudeguru.blogspot.tw/2012_01_01_archive.html and received a mention as a runner-up back in late 2014.
She's still a naturist after all those years ... because she's still open about the lifestyle, which for millions of Germans like her is not some kind of exotic minority quirk that has to be hidden in the shadows, but just an ordinary habit, like collecting stamps or cycling or playing tennis.
As a model and as presenter of the fashion designer show Project Runway, one could accuse Heidi Klum of hypocrisy. If she's a naturist, why is she promoting clothes? Shouldn't she be doing the opposite, condemning clothes and telling everybody to throw off the tyranny of textile and design?
A world without clothing would be a wonderful thing - especially if you got to live in a country where temperatures are elevated enough year round - I'm thinking of parts of Thailand here.
Unfortunately, most people still live in environments where that is not possible - often for merely climatic reasons, but also because turning up at work or going out eating naked is not accepted in most parts of the world.
There are people working on changing that - I'm thinking of my Real Naturist of the Year 2016, Lady God1va, who went naked at a hotel in Thailand, or the Free the Nipple people, the Go Topless activists, the people behind naked restaurant projects like London's The Bunyadi, the World Naked Bike Riders, and so on.
Yes, Heidi Klum is not a total 100 percent naturist, but thanks to her comments in interviews, she shows that naturism is not the outrageous hobby of a small minority, but is a practice that should be acceptable to every and any "body."
A Heidi Klum interview with Miami's Ocean Drive magazine:
https://oceandrive.com/heidi-klum-on-project-runway-her-lingerie-collection-why-she-loves-miami
Heidi Klum's only partial nude photo shoot for Allure in 2012:
http://www.allure.com/gallery/heidi-klum-2012
More Heidi Klum, from Allure and from the Young Naturists of America website:

Naked Germany at CNN

 

Congratulations, CNN!

On the whole, I don't really like a lot of the international media, but in this case, CNN - at least the website, I don't know about the TV station - has brought a balanced and serious account of naturism, in Germany.

The main reason is that the story comes from an insider: a German who like most of his compatriots grew up in a family where naturism was not an ideology but a way of life. He tells the story of what naturism is, how it originated more than a century ago as a health movement, and what you can do and not do in the nude in Germany.

Freikoerperkultur - Free Body Culture, the German term for naturism - may have most of its followers in that country, but as Germans traveled all over Europe from the 1960s on, naturism expanded. It came back from the Mediterranean shores to envelop all of Europe.

Proponents of today's Free the Nipple movement in the United States and Asia would do well to study the lessons of naturism and follow its example. The starting points of both movements are widely different, but in the end, it is all about respect for others, for one's body, and for the freedom of non-sexual social nudity.

You can and should read the CNN article at http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/06/travel/naked-germany/

The German naturist federation is at www.dfk.org.