This issue might again look like a chic skin magazine. But Purple Fashion isn’t a sex magazine hiding behind the façade of fashion. We prefer to think of nudity as Roland Barthes did, that it’s the Degree Zero of style. Nudity imprints itself on time, along with architecture, fashion, music, and art. We do explore nudity — not as a semi-pornographic tool, but as an indicator of fashion’s seasonal changes, as a barometer of its never-ending artistic evolution. The 19th century nude by the sculptor Aristide Maillol featured on our cover, and those by Auguste Rodin in the visual essay that closes this issue, incarnate their era, just as the dazzling beauty of Laetitia Casta embodies ours. The frenetic, erotic tableaux of Les Krims encapsulate the ’70s just as accurately. And I believe that Terry Richardson’s topless models, the Japanese actress Sakura Ando wearing only Ligia Dias’s latest jewelry collection,…