NAKED AMBITION!

It used to be just Z-listers. Now even major stars are baring all at premieres. LIBBY PURVES deplores a demeaning trend

Help! It’s awards season and the red-carpet appears to have turned into a Fifties Soho peepshow. Of course, down among the newcomers, wannabes and aspiring lingerie models you expect a few legs to flash and rogue breasts to make daring breaks for freedom. But nakedness has become the new normal even for those old and established enough to keep a reasonable acreage of skin under cover.

Flanks and bottoms wave to the breeze. Underboob and sideboob wobble in jellified abandon. Crotches are close-up: as patsy says in AbFab, one false move and the world’s your gynaecologist.

It’s access-all-areas as the owners’ plasteredon smiles declare unconvincingly to a watching world that they just adore the outfit, darling; he’s such a fabulous designer and I’m so lucky to be made a fool of by such a genius. Oh, and if any director is watching, let this particularly unusual patch of flesh I’m showing reassure him that I am totally up for nude scenes!

Never has so much been flashed at so many. From Murmansk to patagonia, citizens of the internet age may learnedly compare the underside of 19-year-old starlet Bella Hadid’s breasts with Dutch model lara Stone’s, and debate whether Myleene Klass’s left buttock is, or is not, a quite different shape to Madonna’s.

Not that they will be different, of course, because when you’ve seen one carefully toned, buffed, proudly maintained curve of female flesh, you’ve pretty much seen it all.

It would be more interesting, if less alluring to simple-minded male viewers, if the ladies weren’t all so dazzlingly buff. But, of course, if they weren’t, then they’d wear more normal clothes.

They’d want something pretty, and a little bit teasing in its flare and flutter, and tell the more sadistically inventive designers and tit-tape engineers to back off.

The implication now is that ‘perfect’ bodies are no more or less than fleshy passports: the price of celebrity status.

Naturally, this does not apply to men. They can be hunky or runty, hairy or flabby under their tuxedos and offer no more than a flirty grin. The routes towards their genitalia, from above and below, are not even signalled, let alone shaved and revealed.

There has been reasonable irritation at the idea that women have to wear toe-crunching stilettos to scale fashionable social mountains, and that battle is being won.

But this sense that near-nudity is a normal route to fame is actually nastier. You can argue that it’s fair enough for the models. photogenic bodies are, after all, the main thing they have to sell.

If Bella Hadid calculates that coming out in half a curtain and no pants is the route to career success, fine. If lara Stone decides that the underside of her breasts is her best feature and mustn’t be missed by talent scouts, good luck to her.

But blonde Saturdays singer Mollie King writes her own songs, has had numerous top-ten albums, and should not feel that her selling-point is groin and nipple rather than tune and lyric.

Nicky Hilton is a fashion designer, so fair enough to break boundaries; but she shouldn’t have to offer her personal bum, whole, to her public.

Madonna, 57, has been flashing her bits for ever, and if she’s desperate to let us know they’ve lasted the course, fair enough. It’s her thing.

But more dismaying is the way that senior actresses, as established and thoughtful and gifted and hard-working as any man, feel the need to show as much as possible. Can that really be Anne Hathaway, so electrifying in les Miserables, sporting a sort of black sling arrangement with most of her right tit a-drooping from the armpit?

Is that our Oscar-winning Jennifer lawrence in similar deshabille?

ClASSICAl musician Myleene Klass, whose buttocks are at their best when seated on a piano stool, waves them at the breeze in public. Jennifer Aniston, 47, one of the best screen and sitcom comediennes of her generation, with drop- dead timing and adult dignity, seems to feel that on the red carpet her crotch is the main event.

Nicole Kidman, 48, is an Oscar-winner and gave a brilliant turn as DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin on stage in the West end last year, yet get her on a red carpet and she’ll be sharing her navel and two-foot of bosom.

And, dear God, Amal Clooney, who presumably prefers the label ‘ top human rights lawyer’ to ‘George’s bimbo’, has certainly freed her upper, inner, admirable but-not- entirelyrelevant thighs.

Gwyneth paltrow — another Oscar winner — admitted a couple of years ago that one outfit was so sheer over the lady bits that ‘everyone went scrambling for a razor’.

She has also stepped out in a bumbaring Antonio Berardi dress which nearly revealed the bit she famously likes to expose to herbal steam.

The oddest thing about this semi-stripping, almost slave-market approach to female presentation is that so many claim they are doing it for feminism.

Victoria Beckham was this week pictured sitting around in her knickers (somewhat airbrushed by the look of it) on the cover of elle Hong Kong, plugging her designs and saying she was ‘empowering’ the rest of us.

Madonna has been telling us for years that her peculiar fetish-gear is all about womanly power.

Now Harriet Harman of all people — once the scourge of the page 3 girl — giggles on Good Morning Britain that she is an ‘ expert’ on the Kardashians and admires their ‘ bravery and pioneering spirit’ in controlling their own agenda.

So, since this ultimately pC voice is a former Minister for Women, I respectfully tried to feel empowered by Kim K’s latest full-moon bum shot, and looked again at the red-carpet pictures of admirable, focused, talented and successful women flashing their flubber at the pitiless cold lenses.

I tried. But no, they don’t make me feel empowered. I shall stick to drawing my inspiration from comediennes Victoria Wood and Miranda Hart, singer Dolly parton, sailor ellen MacArthur, war reporter Kate Adie, the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the young Margaret Thatcher, Aung San Suu Kyi, and my late Auntie Dorothy. even though I have never had so much as a glimpse of any of their underboobs.