It's the third and final day of our 'Nude' shoot at the Fashion Revolution Live Studio with photographer Tim Gutt and set designer and art director Shona Heath: our stream kicked off a few moments ago, and on-set preparations are well underway. Our hairstylist Maarit Niemela and make-up artist Andrew Gallimore are putting the final touches in place - eschewing our Green Room, the team have opted to show all preparations in the Live space under the watchful gaze of not only our webcams, but also the Fashion Revolution gallery-goers through a wall of two-way mirror.

As Fashion Director at SHOWstudio.com my job is rendered somewhat difficult on this particular shoot - when the theme is the nude, the fashion is, quite naturally, pretty much non-existant. Or so you would think at first (full-frontal) glance. The fashion historian Anne Hollander has reasoned that the nude is always a reflection of the fashion of her time - in laymans terms, if you look at the voluptuous, silky flesh of Rubens' nudes, you find a reflection in seventeenth century costume - think of those massed swathes of pellucid satin, every fold catching the light. Ironically, the nude always seems to wear the fashion of her time. Shona and Tim have similarly researched historical attitudes and approaches to nudity - alongside a raft of fashion academics courtesy of Central Saint Martins - in order to reinvent them for today. If we're talking about the nude wearing the fashion of her time, it's fitting that our 'new nude' is in actual fact covered from head to toe, albeit in the finest layer of make-up. Surely, the best summary of a postmodern nude is one that isn't nude at all?!

Hopefully that wasn't all too theoretical, or comepletely misconstrued by yours truly! As luck may have it, I'm pinning down Shona and Tim for a quick chat about more of the ideas behind the shoot very shortly, so watch the blog, twitter and of course the live stream for more info.