For most everyone, nudity is the most personal state of being. And, it is frequently difficult to discuss personal things. Postcards have at times filled the blanks created by that uneasiness. Here is a gallery of nudes on postcards that portray the one characteristic we all share.
BE ADVISED: Even in our world of postcards there are elements that may be offensive to some readers. The following article may have content (in the text or the illustrations) that some readers may find objectionable. If so, please accept our apology and go on to the next article.
I was recently told of a doctor’s visit by the person who was the patient. It involved cousins who wished to marry but were related through a common ancestor four generations removed. At the end of a consultation with a genetics specialist the couple was assured by the physician that there are no guarantees in life except the fact that all babies are born naked.
With that piece of sage advice in mind, the staff at Postcard History has spent at least a dozen minutes identifying the varied categories of postcard nudity. We have created the following list: Ancient and Mystic, artistic, comic, occupational, public, social, and fantasy.
Nudity is defined in terms of clothes. Nude. Adj 1. BARE, NAKED, UNCLOTHED. A Nude. Noun. A human figure especially as depicted in art. 2. The condition of being nude such as .
Ancient and Mystic
Left: G. Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo e Dafne. Currently on exhibit at the Borghese in Rome.
Right: Thaleia, the Muse of Comedy. A marble in the Vatican Museum.
Artistic
Left: Delphin Enjolras’s oil on canvas, The Pearls.
Right: Lieber Lowe . . . von Fidus. 1892 copper plate etching of “The Girl and the Lion.” The girl, while bathing, sees the lion in the reeds and runs to say, “Dear lion, don’t run away – don’t be afraid of small, Marion!”
Comic
Left: A Donald McGill comic that shows a little behind.
Right: A Bill Irwyn play on words! Wow, instead of How.
Occupational
Left: From the Paris Salon, Guillaume’s Dancer dressing for the performance.
Right: From the School of Fine Arts, Paris, professional models in the Life classes.
Public
Left: The most visited tourist site is Belgium is the Manneken Pis in Brussels. This classic display of public nudity was put in place in 1619 – 413 years old and he is still …. there!
Right: A Time to Dance in the Gustav Vigeland Sculpture Park, Oslo Norway. The world’s largest sculpture park by one artist. It is a celebration of birth, life, and death.
Social
Left: A north African maiden allows her “curious” friend to visit from afar.
Right: A beautiful young woman prepares “behind the scenes” to meet her lover.
Fantasy
Left: A bevy of red-haired mermaids frolic at the “Wreck of the Seacraft.”
Right: Albert Lynch’s “Summer’s Maiden.”
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As the doctor said, every baby is born naked. And there are many ways to enjoy the result of our birth. Postcard History presents this gallery of nudes as a sample of what has become of us after our common start.
Postcard History is a free online magazine dedicated to vintage and historic picture postcards and the many stories associated with them. We feature richly illustrated articles designed to both inform and entertain postcard collectors and history buffs. We also provide the most comprehensive listing of forthcoming shows around. And there’s a rich trove of links to institutional and personal online postcard collections. There’s also a comprehensive, verified listing of active postcard clubs in the U. S. and Canada, which we’re working on expanding worldwide.
Ore Ogunbiyi Consumer and health-care correspondent
In 2020 Lancôme hired an agency to create a social-media campaign for their Nigerian market. I was cast as a “nanoinfluencer”. Sporting a dress of feathers for a photoshoot in the middle of the Lagos Lagoon, my airbrushed face was all over the brand’s Instagram grid. The pay was negligible but I was too flattered and woozy with free perfume to notice.
Social-media influencers have gained prominence over the past decade and are often mocked. But while reporting this week’s story I spoke to Parisian store assistants, luxury-goods executives and bankers, and all were in agreement: it is time to take influencers seriously. They are now enduring intermediaries between customers and the world’s most valuable brands. Big consumer firms may spend $16bn directly on influencers this year, with three-quarters of American marketers participating. In 2020 China’s statisticians put the size of its influencer economy, including sales they helped generate, at $210bn, or 1.4% of GDP. The figure is almost certainly higher now. In October Lipstick King and Viya, two of China’s star influencers, helped sell goods worth $3bn in a day, more than Amazon’s average global daily gross transaction value. Outside China, the iPhone’s new privacy settings have made targeted ads through Facebook less effective. Influencers offer an alternative.
With size comes professionalism. The hours of work that go into curating social-media content are often dismissed as frivolous. But a carefully placed product can generate real buzz for brands. Influencers can win labels cool points with Gen Z, offer a bridge to uncharted markets, and create content that is snappier than that which dull corporations create on their own. As our leader points out, professionalism also means new tools to assess the value being added. The return on brands’ investment can be eye-popping. The “media impact value” of influencers’ activities, a measure compiled by Launchmetrics, a data firm, to reflect such returns, often exceeds that of established stars. Dressing Emma Chamberlain (if you haven’t heard of her, ask your younger relatives) in Louis Vuitton at the Met Gala generated more buzz ($16m-worth) than Balenciaga’s announcement of Kim Kardashian as its ambassador ($2.4m).
Even humble nanoinfluencers are more useful than you might think. (And I’m not just saying that.) They keep their followers close, earning their trust. For smaller brands, they are a chance to compete locally. For bigger ones, they are good value, not least because TikTok’s algorithm is designed to amplify their niche, highly engaging content. Of course, there are problems. Old-school luxury firms worry that ceding some control of their brand is a gamble and fear losing their image of exclusivity. Con artists abound. But as the boundary between e-commerce and entertainment blurs, the global army of influencers is here to stay. If you have any doubts about their power, just look at China. This week, in the latest instalment of its Common Prosperity campaign, which is partly aimed at reasserting state control over the digital economy, the government threatened a crackdown on the influencing business. Why? It fears that the industry has got too big for its Louboutins.
We calculate that in 2022 brands will spend $16bn on influencers, making up 3% of total digital-ad spending and 11% of total ad spending on social media.
Dissecting the big themes in markets, business and the economy
The next wave of outsourcing A half-a-trillion-dollar bet on revolutionising white-collar work
Digitisation of everything, cloud computing and hybrid working is fuelling a boom in Indian IT consulting
TWO DECADES ago India’s information-technology (IT) firms were the stars of the rising country’s corporate firmament. The industry’s three giants, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, became household names at home and familiar to chief executives of big businesses abroad, who had outsourced their companies’ countermeasures against the feared “millennium bug”, expected to wreak havoc on computers as the date changed from 1999 to 2000, to Indian software engineers. By the mid-2000s the Indian IT trio’s revenues were growing by around 40% a year, as Western CEOs realised that Indian programmers could do as good a job as domestic ones or better, at a fraction of the price. Then, following the global financial crisis of 2007-09, revenue growth slowed to single digits. For years afterwards the stars seemed to be losing some of their shine.
Now they are back in the ascendant. Having declined as a share of GDP between 2017 and 2019, exports of Indian software services ticked up again as the world’s companies turned to them for help amid the disruption to operations and IT systems wrought by the pandemic. In the last financial year they reached an all-time high of $150bn, or 5.6% of Indian GDP (see chart 1). NASSCOM, a trade body, expects the industry’s overall revenues to grow from $227bn last year to $350bn by 2026.
In the 12 months to March sales at TCS, Infosys and Wipro are once again forecast to grow by double digits (see chart 2)—this time from a much higher base than 20 years ago. All told, they could rake in nearly $60bn next year, up from just over $40bn in 2019 (see chart 3). In the past two years they have added an astonishing 200,000 or so people to their combined workforce, which now numbers nearly 1.1m. Add the Indian businesses of big Western IT-services firms such Cognizant (which is based in New Jersey but India-focused), IBM and Capgemini, as well as smaller Indian rivals and around 1,600 “captives”, as in-house Indian operations of foreign firms are known, and the headcount rises to 5m.
More important, both revenues and ranks of Indian IT look poised to keep growing briskly. Lalit Ahuja, who runs a firm that helps to set up captives, says a new one opens every other week. TCS, the industry’s brightest star, reckons that its sales will rise from nearly $30bn today to $50bn before 2030. It is eyeing 1m employees. Infosys and Wipro have comparable ambitions. And investors are buying it. The market value of the big three has doubled to $330bn since covid-19 first emerged. With the addition Cognizant and Tech Mahindra, another Indian firm, the figure is around $400bn (see chart 4). This represents a huge bet on the future of white-collar jobs.
Three global forces lie behind Indian IT’s sparkling outlook. All manner of businesses are digitising ever more of their operations. They are moving more activities to the computing cloud. And work is becoming more remote. India’s low-cost, competent coders can help with all three.
Start with digitisation. The pandemic has turbocharged efforts by companies of all stripes to make their businesses more agile, efficient and clever. Retailers have introduced kerbside pickup. Clinics have launched digital doctor’s appointments. Schools have run online classes. Factories have been kitted out with sensors to allow remote monitoring in the absence of workers, locked down at home. Data from covid-19 vaccine trials have needed analysing. All these innovations required sophisticated software. A lot if it has been developed in India since early 2020. And there is more to come. Among Infosys’s many projects are several connected to electric cars (for example software for the vehicles themselves and for petrol stations to offer charging). It is helping a Western retailer expand into health care and financial services.
The corporate great migration to the cloud offers further opportunities. According to Anuj Kadyan of McKinsey, a consultancy, big ones include supervising the migration itself for clients, ensuring that the new cloud operations are cyber-secure and adding advanced cloud-based data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) on top. Earlier this year JPMorgan Chase, an American bank, announced it would add 6,000 people to its substantial Indian business to work on the cloud, cyber-security and AI. IBM has opened a cyber-security centre in India to cater to its Asian clients.
Combined, digitisation and the cloud make it possible for companies to untether from their physical headquarters not just peripheral functions but parts of their ever more digital core business. Many have done just that during the pandemic, thanks to remote work. This opens up the third opportunity for India’s IT consultants. They could assume some of the core corporate roles from white-collar workers in the rich world. Wages for new hires in India can be as little as $5,000 annually, less than a tenth of the going rate in rich countries. Even with associated cost, Indian projects cost at least 20% less than the same endeavours in the West, estimates Peter Bendor-Samuel, boss of the Everest Group, a management consultancy.
A ballooning Indian “talent cloud”, as TCS calls it, is the biggest opportunity of all. It is also the most uncertain. For one thing, some Western companies are having second thoughts about hybrid work (which requires at least partial presence in the office), let alone the fully remote sort. Indian wages are also beginning to rise. India’s IT giants and captives are competing for the best and brightest among themselves, as well as with a vibrant startup scene. McKinsey estimates that compensation costs have risen by 20-30% over the past year. Company executives say it is not uncommon for employees to ask for their wages to be doubled. Attrition at the big firms has spiked.
As the nature of outsourced work changes, the Indian advantage may erode further. It is easier for clients to outsource standardised assignments on the periphery of corporate functions to faraway India. It is harder to do so for high-value projects at the heart of their business, which require constant communication, continuity and confidentiality. For these reasons, proximity matters. At the very least, it means being in the same time zone as your client. Infosys and TCS now operate in more than 40 countries. Infosys now has more than 30 outposts across America and is building a new $245m campus in Indianapolis. Mr Kumar’s own job has relocated from Bengaluru to New York. Infosys plans to add 10,000 American workers in the next few years, bringing the total to 35,000. “We needed capacity closer to the customers,” explains Ravi Kumar, who oversees Infosys’s global services business.
Still, India accounts for the bulk of its IT firms’ workforce. Although the companies are cagey about where their employees are based, securities filings by Infosys and Cognizant show that, give or take, three-quarters of staff are based in India. If India’s entire IT industry grew at the same rate as TCS, more or less doubling its workforce this decade, that could mean nearly 5m new Indian white-collar jobs—and potentially 5m fewer in the West.
This points to a final hurdle. Amid supply-chain disruptions from the pandemic, now compounded by Russia’s war in Ukraine, and a geostrategic contest with China, Western politicians are in a protectionist mood. Few would relish millions of well-paid positions moving to India on their watch. Critical visas that once allowed the Indian firms to send star employees aboard to work directly with clients have already grown harder to come by, forcing these positions to be filled locally. Although data can in theory be stored and analysed anywhere, governments are increasingly keen to limit cross-border information flows, often invoking national security. By building a few more campuses in Western countries India’s IT titans may alleviate some of those concerns. They are unlikely to make them disappear.
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