Why Is Fashion So Obsessed with Bathrooms?

The fashion world has been gabbing about bathrooms. It started with Alessandro Michele’s fall 2025 Valentino show, staged on March 8 in a faux public bathroom with stalls painted in the house’s signature red. Michele’s explanation of his choice, as detailed in his show notes: “No intimacy can ultimately undress… Because the idea that there’s an authentic self, untouched by life and its determinations, is misleading.” Ultimately, it’s the toilet that got people talking.

This isn’t the first time fashion has gone to the bathroom for inspiration. See the Winter 2025 issue of 032c, which featured a nude Amelia Gray on a pink toilet. Go back 20 or 30 years, you’ll find countless fashion editorials dedicated to the loo. The 1990s began with Madonna, photographed by Herb Ritts for the June issue of Interview, in a men's room between urinals. In 1997, Jenny McCarthy starred in a Candies underwear ad, seated on a toilet with the brand’s knickers around her ankles.

Ellen Von Unwerth was a regular in the bathroom and had Naomi Campbell simultaneously brushing her teeth and shaving her armpits while seated on a toilet; Mario Sorrenti posed an enchantingly innocent Kate Moss naked on the loo. January 2001 was i-D’s “The Bathroom Issue,” while a rather messy toilet was central on The Face’s October 2002 “Trash” cover, which featured Chloe Sevigny, Michael Pitt, and Rosario Dawson.

Why does fashion keep returning to the bathroom? Does the industry’s obsession with youth extend to a 6-year-old’s humor?

“It's intimate,” says Paul Cavaco, a legendary stylist. His early 1990s work for Harper’s Bazaar included an editorial called “The Date,” in which actors Noah Wyle and Trish Goff pose in and around a public bathroom stall. Wyle, wearing a suit, even pantomimes peeing in one of the photographs, which were taken by Patrick Demarchelier. “Going to the bathroom is like physically vacuuming your body,” says Cavaco. “You're in stages of undress all the time in there. There's a sexiness to a bathroom.” In 1992, photographer Dewey Nicks shot then-emerging Amber Valletta and Shalom Harlow hanging out in bathroom stalls. “It's a little punk rock to pick the place that people think is unglamorous,” says Nicks.

Nominally, the bathroom is a private place. “Where there is privacy there is honesty, and honesty is always attractive,” says Ferdinando Verderi, a leading creative director, formerly of Vogue Italia. The celebrated fashion photographer Pamela Hanson has shot many portraits in bathrooms, several of which are in her first monograph, Girls. “It was more playful and funny, more the intimacy of being in the bathroom,” she says. “For me, it was a private moment for women.”

In the 2010s, when smartphones emerged and brought new notions of public versus private, a new type of bathroom picture emerged: the toilet selfie. Google “celebrity toilet” and find round-ups of models and famous folks posing and posting from the loo. There’s Winnie Harlow in a gown after the Met Gala, Elle Fanning in a sparkly dress, Billie Eilish in thigh-high battle boots, and Kardashians galore. People magazine’s website has an entire article just on Miley Cyrus’s toilet pictures.

It's a humble brag from the lowliest of places. When perfect mirror selfies became rote and fans demanded more access, the toilet selfie was a natural next step. It’s staged vulnerability, looking sexy in an unsexy state, appearing fabulous even while engaging in the basest of activities. There’s a frisson of sex, the glamour of the unglamorous.

While it might be base, there’s a democracy to it. “The bathroom is the one place where everyone's the same,” says Cavaco. In the bathroom, “you don't have your stylist or your PR people or anything like that,” says Nicks. “Some of the decisions made in the bathroom really do reflect the actual personality of the person instead of the team.”

Accessing the inaccessible, the mundane made special, the sexy, the skin—those are all concepts that tend to resound in fashion. There’s also some practical advantages to the bathroom. Cavaco worked on Madonna’s seminal 1992 book, Sex. “We shot some of it in the bathroom in an old YMCA—the bathrooms were beautiful,” he explains. Bathrooms are “either pristine or dirty—either way, it's kind of interesting.”

“There's always beautiful light happening in bathrooms because women are using it to put makeup on,” says Hanson. “I used to shoot on location and hotel rooms and in apartments all the time in Paris, and we would always end up in the bathroom. In Paris, the bathrooms are so charming.”