The Week I Went Naked

Can you ever feel comfortable in your own skin if you’re never comfortable, well, just in your own skin? Dolly Alderton strips off to find out.

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I remember the first time I realised I was naked. I was seven, it was a sunny afternoon and I was running around my childhood home. It was only when I careened into the living room, and saw my mum, dad and a few of their friends drinking wine in their jeans and shirts that I noticed I wasn’t wearing a thing. I’ve often longed to return to that carefree, flushed-cheek naked fairy, running around, laughing her head off over the intervening 20 years. And I’ve never quite got there.

Like many women, my adolescence was spent working out a series of tricks to conceal my naked body – even when naked. At 13, my mum and I had a complex secret-nodding system when we were on family holidays that meant she would know exactly when I wanted to get out of the pool and would stand there with an outstretched towel so no-one would see me in a bikini. At school, I discovered how to get changed in the gym changing room without ever having to take a single item of clothing off – I was swapping clothes rather than removing them. When I started sleeping with boys I learnt early on to always have a shirt oh-so-casually thrown next to my side of the bed to grab whenever I stood up to get out of bed.