At this French exhibition, check your clothes at the door

Marseille, France: A group of visitors listened intently to their tour guide Friday at one of Marseille's biggest museums. One woman examined old posters with bright colors and bold graphics. Another studied a collection of black-and-white photographs laid out on a table.

They all were naked, save for their shoes.

The disrobed spectators had come to the Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean, known as Mucem, for an exhibition about social nudity, which practitioners often call naturism. According to the museum, almost 100,000 people have visited the show since it opened in July, and, at five special viewings, about 600 of them have been naked.

Some were regular naturists, identifiable by their tan-line-less, often leathery backsides.

But many had never been naked with strangers before, except for the odd skinny dip. For them, shared nudity was mostly confined to locker rooms or bedrooms, for sports or for sex. This was a new way to relate to art, and to their bodies. Acceptance. Or, maybe, neutrality.

"Normally, bodies are so sexualized," said Jule Baumann, 27, one of the visitors on Friday. "I liked the idea of being in a place where it's just normal to be naked."

A naked museum show itself is not novel: Museums in Paris; Vienna; Montreal; Milan; Barcelona, Spain; and the small English town of Dorchester have hosted such evenings before.

But Mucem may be the first major museum to dedicate a major exhibition to the history, culture and iconography of naturism, which is similar to nudism, but underpinned by a philosophy of self-respect, respect for others and respect for the natural world.

"I always say that nudity is a tool -- a very effective tool -- to get people to achieve body acceptance," said Stéphane Deschênes, the president of the International Naturist Federation. "But it's not the objective."

The exhibit, "Naturist Paradises," traces the development of the lifestyle in Europe over a century. It begins with its origins as a pioneering social health movement and travels through its contemporary embrace of the body positivity movement, presenting old magazine covers, grainy black-and-white photographs, archival videos, paintings and text displays.

For some naturists, the show is a vindication. Many have long felt that their lifestyle has been dismissed as a vacationer's voyeurism.

"We are constantly trying to rationalize, and justify, and explain it," Deschênes said.

On Friday, the last naked event before the show closes on Dec. 9, participants arrived just after the clothed visitors had left.

They bought tickets, then stripped in a makeshift changing room. Many wrapped themselves in towels or sarongs to cross the museum's lobby to the exhibition gallery, which was blessedly warm. (Mucem made sure of that, said Amélie Lavin, a curator: "It was too cold in the beginning.")

Xavier Cassagne, 49, a longtime naturist who lives in Marseille, said he would not have wanted to see the exhibition clothed. That would have been just weird, he said. "If I can come here naked, with other people naked? It fits the mood."

Naked, though, is relative. Visitors had to wear shoes. And then there were the accessories.

Some wore cross-body bags. (Most torsos do not have pockets.) One man paired a fedora with slides. A woman played with a statement necklace that dangled between her breasts. This being France, an older man even looped his little pink towel gently around his neck, like a scarf.

"So often, we see nude forms in museums and we're not often sort of thinking about ourselves as a body," said Maggie Kurkoski, 34, an art historian who had come with her spouse.

Kurkoski mused about the power dynamics of being clothed while drawing a naked model or analyzing a nude statue, adding that she liked learning about naturism while she was both "observing bodies, but also comfortable with my own body."

Naturism has a long history in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, but France is the focus of the show. The country is the world's top destination for naturist vacationers, said Deschênes, the international naturist federation president. The French Naturist Federation estimates that there are about 2 million naturist tourists in France each year, about half French and the other half from abroad.

Partially, that's because of France's climate and beaches, said Stephen Harp, the author of "Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France." France was more permissive than some of its neighbors: It tolerated naturist meet-ups from the 1920s, he said, and permitted them formally after World War II.

"There's also this notion that France is this place of freedom, that there's liberty," said Harp, a professor of history at the University of Akron.

And while France's liberated reputation can conjure images of freewheeling extramarital affairs, naturists insist that their practice is intrinsically nonsexual. (Many said this was a common misconception among "textiles," who are the "muggles" of the naturist's world.)

"Looking at a girl totally naked is not exciting," said Éric Stéfanut, the communications director for the French Naturist Federation. Naturists, he explained, see new people naked all the time.

"So," he added, "it's boring." The argument has merit. When everyone in a room is naked, no one person stands out -- although there were many body types among the visitors Friday.

There were tattoos and pierced nipples, ribs and fleshy tummies, bald spots and wispy beards. Scrotums and breasts swung wide. Some had cesarean scars. One older woman, naked from the waist up, looked around the show on an electric mobility scooter.

Lucca Linke, 31, said she had thought about trimming her body hair. But why bother?

Her friend, Kaja Baumgart, 22, agreed. She had worried that other guests would notice her tampon string. But soon, she said, she relaxed.

"Everybody is acting like normal," she said. "I can also be acting like normal."

After the visit, a few leaders of French naturism went to Stéfanut's house to celebrate. They left their shoes by the front door and their clothes on the bed, their underwear tucked under their coats like scarves at a textile party. Over pizzas and boxed white wine, they asked after this one's surgery, that one's vacation, and France's recent victory over Argentina in rugby.

They were there, chatting, comfortable in their own skins. Comfortable around each other's, too.