It seems like these events are becoming more publically accepted but I don't think we are entering a brave nude world just yet. There is a small but significant degree of overlap - I spot faces I recognise from one event to the next, and hear people talking about other events they've done, but I also talk to a lot of people who are doing it as a one-off, have never done anything like this before and would never do anything like this again. It just happens to be local, or for a charity they are committed to.
The original Naked Mile in the USA was growing quite big then got banned, now there are lots of smaller events at different colleges, but with a few (amazing!) exceptions you will only find a handful of women at any given college event getting totally naked in front of their fellow students, and probably the same girls year on year. The WNBR is very popular in a handful of cities and the combination of body-paint, weight of numbers and the speed you travel at gives more people the confidence to go naked, but again in any given year there are only a few thousand participants worldwide and only a fraction of those are fully naked females. Tunick seems to be scaling back these days, doing more small-scale artistic pieces rather than the spectactular urban skinscapes he is known for, possibly due to the economic climate and less money available for cities and museums to commission him.
Young people have always and will always find excuses to get naked at festivals, concerts, parties and parades. The nudist community is consistent and stable in terms of numbers. Fully nude and mixed sauna, spa, beach, lake and river bathing remains common throughout mainland Europe and elsewhere in the world, even though in Anglophone countries it remains a very limited niche community. TV, movies, art performances become more nudity-friendly over time as censorship and moral policing decline with the advance of progressive liberalism and information entitlement, and people getting used to the new boundaries as they keep moving. There are still huge areas of the world with a conservative (some would say intolerant) attitude but they are closing themselves off more and more from the rest of us.
We see a lot of pictures of a lot of beautiful women participating in a lot of events, but that is because any such picture is bound to end up here. What you see on OCC isn't the tip of the iceberg, what you see here is pretty much the whole damn iceberg, at least as far as the UK/USA/Canada/Australia goes. Luckily there are lots of things going on in the rest of the world which occasionally surface here and blow our minds - like my Ukrainian winter bathers, or the recently highlighted Catalonian nude run.
(I too apologise for the rambling, I know most people are here for the pictures, but it was an interesting question!)
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