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It wasn’t your average Sunday night. Instead of watching television and eating biscuits on my sofa, I was waiting at the door to a church in east London with a group of nervous women. There was a buzz in the air; the August sunshine was fading at our backs and we were hungry.
“Welcome, welcome!” our host, Charlie, called as we walked in. She was naked. There was a clothes rail on the right-hand side. The expectation was clear: it was time for us all to strip off.
We had just entered the Fude Experience, and for the next four hours, myself – and the other 20-odd women in the room with me – would be dining, dancing and meditating totally nude.
Say the word ‘Fude’ to anybody and chances are they might have heard of it – either via the organisation’s immaculately-curated Instagram page, which shows lots of images of gorgeously-plated dinners, alongside tasteful images of naked women – or by the press it generated the last time it came to London a few years back.
Founded by Charlie Ann Max in 2020, the premise is simple: in a carefully-chosen, private space, a group of women (often women, though Max has run mixed-gender gatherings in the past) come together to celebrate their bodies via a combination of food and mindfulness.
The experience stems from Max’s own struggles with body image. “I grew up dancing,” she tells me before the event. “I’d been a part of the dance world from three years old onwards, [so] I faced a ton of body issues and a disconnection from my body.”
A committed ballet dancer, Max suffered an injury in her early twenties which meant she had to stop, but she says that was a good thing.
Instead of dancing, she started exploring nudity. “It was extremely healing for me because it started to take away the shame that I had around my body,” she explains. So began a decade-long journey, in which Max also trained as a plant-based chef at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.
Eventually, she created Fude, which she’s taken all over the world, hosting dinners across America, in Berlin and, yes, London.
“I’ve learned so much about why being nude actually helps with body image and self-esteem,” Max adds. “And because of all the positive impact that it's had on me, I wanted to create a space for other people to also feel that for themselves as well.”
The evening certainly felt geared towards doing just that. With glasses of flavoured water in hand, women were encouraged to awkwardly mingle for the first half hour.
As a prudish Brit, the experience of standing naked in an old, renovated church with other naked women was profoundly surreal – even more so considering the agonising that went into preparing for the evening. Should I shave my legs? Put on make-up? Wash my hair? Where should I look?
It was a depressing reminder of why we needed events like this in the first place: nothing says patriarchy like making you worry about beauty standards at an event geared towards celebrating women in all their forms. But as it turned out, I needn’t have bothered worrying; Max was a pro at making the women feel at ease.
After our half-hour of socialising, she put on some music and led us in a series of dances around the dinner table. The theme for the night was the ‘monstrous feminine’, and accordingly our dances (which combined walking, twirling our limbs and moving ‘as though through water’) soon looked and felt like something out of a pagan temple.
Oddly enough, the experience of being naked stopped being odd after the first ten minutes. Perhaps that’s the point.
“I think nudity represents a lot more than being naked,” Max says. “It represents surrender. We're peeling back our layers to our most vulnerable state and I believe that there's a lot of power in exploring and finding confidence in our vulnerable places.
“I put a lot of intention in creating a safe space for people to explore themselves and feel themselves. And when you're stripped back and you're nude, there's not a lot of masking. You're able to connect a lot more freely and openly and it creates a lot of ease in the space.”
Ease was essential, because in addition to socialising with complete strangers, this was also all about getting deep.
As a group, we were encouraged to sit in front of the altar (a few candles and statues of women had been placed next to a cross) for a meditation session by wellbeing expert Rebecca Moore. Sitting, then lying on our backs, we were encouraged to embrace ‘all parts’ of ourselves – the unloved, the repressed, the forgotten bits – and welcome them back in.
If that sounds a bit airy-fairy, maybe this evening isn’t for you – added to which, there was no alcohol involved. But I didn’t feel the lack of it; alcohol would probably have made me even more emotional that I ended up getting.
As the evening drew on, we sat at a long trestle table, ate Max’s three-course meal (all of which was vegan and cooked with in-season fruit and veg) and discussed what the concept of the ‘monstrous feminine’ meant to us.
Handily, there were cards celebrating female monsters from Greek mythology scattered around, and a classics expert in the form of Cosima Carnegie to talk us through all the ways in which women had been othered over the course of millennia.
Quickly, the conversation turned deep. People talked about personal traumas, angers, frustrations, one at a time – the others applauded them, and then the next person took their turn. It did feel liberating, in the way that being listened to properly often does.
As the church bells rang above us, women threw their heads back and howled. It felt exhilarating; euphoric, even.
The evening ended shortly afterwards, with us putting our clothes back on (how strange) and escaping out into the night. But it was nice to carry some of that wildness back with us to our everyday lives; a feeling that, in our busy day-to-day lives, we could all do with a bit more of.
