Why naturism doesn't have a Gen Z problem, it has a marketing problem

There’s a photograph that lives rent-free in my head. It’s from a naturist resort brochure, probably printed sometime around 2009 and it features a smiling white heterosexual couple, somewhere in their comfortable fifties, playing a leisurely game of shuffleboard in the nude. The sky is a perfect Florida blue. Their postures are relaxed. They look like a stock photo for a retirement community, except they aren’t wearing anything.

Photo by Simone Paget/Business Insider.

I don’t say this to be cruel. Those people look genuinely happy, and good for them. But if I’m being honest about why a twenty-four-year-old queer person scrolling Instagram at midnight isn’t booking a membership at their local naturist club, that brochure is most of the explanation.

Naturism has a reputation problem, and the reputation it has is roughly this: it’s a hobby for older, straight, white, partnered people who live in warm climates and have the kind of settled comfort with their bodies that the rest of us are still working toward. The movement has spent decades cultivating that image, more or less deliberately, and it has been extraordinarily successful at attracting exactly that demographic while remaining largely invisible to everyone else.

Which is strange, because if you actually describe naturism’s values to a twenty-something without mentioning the word “naturism,” they tend to be very much on board. Even AANR is still upholding this demographic in their advertising which is where I still see the problem.

The kids are not the problem

Gen Z is the generation that killed diet culture, or at least started the work. They’re the ones who pushed back on Photoshop in advertising, who made “body neutrality” a mainstream concept, who filled TikTok with creators openly discussing the exhausting labor of performing an acceptable body for public consumption. They’re statistically more likely than any previous generation to identify as LGBTQ+, which means they’ve spent their formative years already interrogating the relationship between bodies, identity, and social expectation. They are, in other words, primed.

They’re also the generation most acutely aware of what social media has done to their brains. The research on this is not subtle. Anxiety and depression rates among young people have tracked the rise of image-driven platforms with uncomfortable precision, and Gen Z knows it. “Doomscrolling,” “body checking,” “comparison spiral”: these aren’t clinical terms, they’re the vernacular of people who have lived the experience. A significant portion of them are actively looking for exits.

Naturism, properly understood, is an exit. It’s a practice built on the premise that bodies exist outside their exchange value, that skin isn’t a performance medium, that you can be physically present with other people without your appearance being the point. That’s not a fringe idea in 2026. That’s what a lot of young people are desperately reaching for.

So why aren’t they reaching for naturism? Because naturism hasn’t shown up where they are, and when it has, it’s often shown up wrong.

Photo by Travis Desell. CC BY-SA 4.0

The branding gap

Part of this is a structural problem. The major naturist organizations in the United States, AANR foremost among them, were built in a different century for a different cultural moment. Their marketing speaks in the language of “family-friendly resorts” and “wholesome recreation,” which is fine as far as it goes but tends to evoke a very specific kind of family, a very specific kind of wholesome. The visual vocabulary is sun-drenched and serene, which again, fine, but it rarely makes room for the experiences of people who are still working out their relationship with their bodies, which is to say most people under thirty-five.

There’s also the matter of access. Traditional naturism is expensive. Resort memberships cost money. Many of the most established clothing-optional spaces are geographically inconvenient for urban young people without cars. The model assumes a level of settled, suburban, discretionary-income life that simply isn’t the reality for most people in their twenties right now.

And then there’s the queer question, which is really the elephant in the room. The mainstream naturist movement has historically been at pains to distinguish itself from anything that might be coded as sexually deviant, which is an understandable defensive posture given how aggressively the movement has been mischaracterized over the years. But the side effect of that posture has been an institutional culture that has sometimes felt, at best, indifferent to queer people and, at worst, quietly hostile. LGBTQ+ naturists exist in significant numbers. Gay and queer nude spaces have their own long history. But the mainstream movement and the queer community have operated largely in parallel rather than together, and that separation has cost naturism a potential base of passionate, values-aligned, community-hungry people.

Photo by Alain TANGUY. CC BY-SA 2.5

What a rebrand might actually look like

I want to be careful here, because I’m not suggesting naturism needs to become something it isn’t. The core philosophy doesn’t need an update. Non-sexual, body-liberating, community-oriented nude living is a genuinely radical and genuinely appealing idea. What needs updating is the story being told about it, and who is being invited into that story.

The most compelling naturist content I’ve encountered recently hasn’t come from organizations at all. It’s come from individual voices: hikers writing about the specific, strange freedom of trail nudity; writers connecting clothing-free living to disability justice and body autonomy; queer people describing naturism as the first place they ever felt comfortable in their own skin. These stories don’t look like the shuffleboard brochure. They look like the messy, searching, earnest content that actually travels on the internet in 2026.

There’s a version of naturism’s public face that speaks directly to a young person who is exhausted by the performance of their own body, who has spent years curating their image for an audience that is never satisfied, who suspects there might be something on the other side of all that anxiety but can’t quite see it yet. That version leads with the feeling, not the facility. It talks about what it’s actually like to stop caring about how you look for a few hours. It makes room for people who aren’t already comfortable, because those are the people naturism has the most to offer.

Gen Z doesn’t need to be converted to the values. They’re already there, more or less, or at least closer than any generation that came before them. What they need is an invitation that sounds like it’s meant for them. Not the retired shuffleboard couple, lovely as they are. Not the vague promise of “wholesome family fun.” Something that acknowledges the specific texture of what it’s like to be a young person in a body right now, in a culture that has monetized and algorithmically optimized every square inch of human flesh, and says: there is another way to be.

The movement has been telling its story to the same audience for fifty years. The audience it hasn’t reached yet isn’t uninterested. It just hasn’t been asked.

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