Dawn Of A New Era

Lina Esco captured the world’s attention by asking women to free the nipple in the name of equality. Now she’s calling on men to join her crusade to update the US Constitution. Will it work?

- James Rickman

You might not know much about the Equal Rights Amendment, but you probably know plenty about Free the Nipple. The former was conceived by suffragist Alice Paul almost a century ago, after American women won the right to vote but still found themselves without gender-specific civil rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. The latter is a global phenomenon created by an actress and activist fed up with the double standards applied to nudity and perpetuated by state law and social media policy. The ERA has languished since the last major push toward its ratification in the early 1980s, and Free the Nipple remains one of the most viral memes of the past decade, supported by the likes of Kendall Jenner, Chrissy Teigen and Cara Delevingne. Despite their differences, these two movements converged two years ago when Free the Nipple creator Lina Esco (who also co-wrote, directed and starred in the 2014 movie of the same name) and a small bipartisan team launched the Human Campaign — an organisation with a new take on getting women’s full equality written into America’s founding document.

“The biggest obstacle we had with Free the Nipple was that it was a very small umbrella; at first glance, people were always misunderstanding it,” Esco says, meeting with PLAYBOY at a breezy hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills. “The word human was so much more powerful. I believe that people don’t want to be divided by race, they don’t want to be divided by colour, they don’t want to be divided by gender. They want to come together.”