The Royals Who Went First
The oldest verified celebrity naturism on record is also the most official. On August 11, 1936, King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson anchored the steam yacht Nahlin off the island of Rab and requested permission from the municipal council to swim without clothes at Kandarola Bay. The council passed a formal resolution granting it – Europe’s first official royal naturism, executed by government decree. The beach still carries the nickname the locals gave it: the English Beach. George Bernard Shaw had praised the island’s isolated bays in 1930, and a young John F. Kennedy toured the same coastline in 1937 as a student.
Four decades later the tradition continued in the Caribbean: in February 1976, paparazzi photographs of Princess Margaret sunbathing topless with Roddy Llewellyn at Gelliceaux Beach on Mustique – the shoreline below her Les Jolies Eaux estate – were published by the News of the World, a scandal that contributed directly to the end of her marriage. Mustique remains a private island where beachwear norms are set by its homeowners’ community.
The Riviera Era
No celebrity did more for the liberation of the beach than Brigitte Bardot. During the 1956 filming of And God Created Woman and throughout the decade that followed, her topless and unclad days at Plage de Pampelonne and Plage de Tahiti in Saint-Tropez – documented endlessly by press photographers – turned a fishing village into the world capital of beach glamour and made topless sunbathing a European norm. One correction matters here: popular culture routinely names her the patron saint of Cap d’Agde, but her documented beach years were exclusively Saint-Tropez. The naturist village of Cap d’Agde was only founded in 1970, after her era, and no mainstream source documents her there.
The Cannes generation went further in front of the lens. Jayne Mansfield’s 1957 beach appearances beside the Carlton Hotel were staged publicity, but her 1963 film Promises! Promises! made her the first mainstream Hollywood star to appear nude in a starring role. And the most famous American nude swim of the century was neither of them: on May 23, 1962, Marilyn Monroe swam nude in the 20th Century Fox studio pool during filming of Something’s Got to Give, documented by set photographers Lawrence Schiller and Ralph Crane. The 1949 Tobey Beach photographs that circulate as “Marilyn at a nude beach” show her in a bikini.
Sardinia and the Balearics: The Paparazzi Era
The telephoto generation gathered on two coastlines. In Sardinia, Heidi Klum and Seal were photographed repeatedly during their August vacations in the Costa Smeralda, topless on the beaches around Porto Cervo in 2008, 2009 and 2011. The most famous images of all came from the water off Pittulongu near Olbia on August 2, 2016, when Orlando Bloom was photographed stand-up paddleboarding completely naked beside Katy Perry – a viral global phenomenon that required no clarification from either party’s representatives.
In the Balearics, Formentera and Ibiza function as the Mediterranean’s clothing-optional celebrity sanctuary. Kate Moss is the most consistently documented case of the century: paparazzi images from Es Cavallet and Playa de Illetes across the 2000s through August 2025, most recently laughing alongside nude bathers with her daughter Lila Grace. Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel were documented in Corsica in July 2003 and in Formentera through the mid-2000s; Sienna Miller appears in the Amalfi Coast file from 2008 and in Formentera in 2011 and 2020. Yacht-based names anchor just offshore: Beyoncé and Jay-Z off Capri and St. Barts in 2013 and 2018, Leonardo DiCaprio off Ibiza and Formentera across the 2010s, Cristiano Ronaldo and Rafael Nadal on the sandbar beach clubs of Ses Illetes. Further along the coast, Sean Connery sunbathed nude on his own Villa Malibu beachfront in Marbella through the 1970s and 1980s, a fixture of the Costa del Sol’s golden era.
The Self-Published Era
The last decade inverted the power relationship: celebrities now document themselves. In June 2023, Salma Hayek posted photographs of herself lying nude on a sauna bench for World Wellbeing Week – a private wellness retreat, published to her own 26 million followers. Chelsea Handler has made an annual tradition of nude birthday content, most recently kneeling in Lapland snow after Finnish sauna sessions in March 2026. Britney Spears posted repeatedly from tropical beaches in French Polynesia and Maui between 2021 and 2024, framing the posts as reclamation after her conservatorship. Sam Smith ran naked along a Costa Rican shoreline in January 2020 with the caption PURA VIDA. Paris Jackson has published a years-long series of nude and topless photographs from waterfalls, hot springs and riverbanks, writing that “being nude is a beautiful thing and you don’t have to make it sexual.” Zac Efron documented textile-free bathing across Iceland’s geothermal springs in his Netflix series Down to Earth, and Gwyneth Paltrow posted her own pre-Christmas infrared sauna photograph in 2020. Kendall Jenner closed the list in November 2025, publishing nude beach photographs from a private island for her thirtieth birthday.
The sauna boom deserves its own paragraph. Finland’s UNESCO recognition of sauna culture in 2020 turned Lapland into the celebrity wellness destination of the decade: Kourtney Kardashian documented her traditional Finnish sauna experience at the Arctic TreeHouse Hotel in Rovaniemi in 2019, and Gordon Ramsay filmed nude sauna and ice-plunge bathing for National Geographic’s Uncharted. Our German sauna culture guide covers the same textile-free infrastructure the celebrities keep discovering.
On the Record
A second tier of documentation is the on-record statement. Helen Mirren, accepting British Naturism’s award in 2004 and reconfirming to Allure in 2023, said: “I do believe in naturism and am my happiest on a nude beach with people of all ages and races. It’s so unsexual and so liberating.” Susan Sarandon told The Guardian that nude beaches “completely strip away objectification.” Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Hurley, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Eva Mendes have all described nude sunbathing or skinny-dipping as ordinary practice in interviews; Matthew McConaughey has linked his nude surfing to his bongo-playing arrest since 1999; and John Krasinski has described the cultural shock of arriving at a German textile-free spa where clothing was prohibited. Kate Winslet has spoken warmly of European nude sauna culture – though one famous quote does not belong to her (see below).
Myths, Misattributions and Honesty Flags
What a list like this refuses matters as much as what it includes:
- Bardot and Cap d’Agde: a conflation, not a record. Her documented years were Saint-Tropez; the naturist village postdates her era.
- The viral “sauna naked across a field” story – reported to police as a naked man, revealed to be a famous actress – belongs to Dame Emma Thompson on The Graham Norton Show, not Kate Winslet, whom the internet prefers to credit.
- Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker’s joint Finnish sauna trip of 2022: never happened. Her Finland visit was 2019, with her children; Barker was not present. The couple’s documented nudity is domestic.
- Julianne Hough’s hot springs posts were nude-hued swimwear, not naturism. Her verified nude appearance was the Women’s Health Naked Issue cover of August 2019.
- Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as “regular nudists”: a naturist-blog rumor. The paparazzi record shows ordinary swimwear on Skiathos and St. Barts.
- Prince Harry, 2012: a Las Vegas hotel suite and private pool – a party, not a naturist venue.
- Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian have all posed nude editorially, but none has a documented public naturist venue visit; Kardashian has said explicitly that she relies on private villas because of paparazzi.
- The Cap d’Agde celebrity myth: the world’s largest naturist city draws European media figures, not Hollywood A-listers, who consistently prefer private yachts off Formentera or Saint-Tropez precisely because Cap d’Agde offers no privacy.
Where to Follow Them
Every verified location in this piece is covered in depth elsewhere on this site: Kandarola and Rab, Pampelonne and Saint-Tropez, the Costa Smeralda and Pittulongu, Es Cavallet and Ses Illetes, and the sauna cultures of Germany and the Nordics. The pattern across ninety years is consistent: celebrity naturism happens where privacy infrastructure already exists – private islands, walled resorts, yacht-accessible coves – and the genuinely public venues, from Haulover to Zipolite, host famous names only where the infrastructure itself enforces the etiquette that makes anonymity possible.
Editorial note: this article names no unverified individuals and publishes no third-party photographs. Entries rely on municipal archives, mainstream press documentation, broadcast interviews, and self-published social media posts. Rumors that failed verification appear only in the myth section, labeled as such.
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