A taboo shattered by ceramic nipples.
Taken from the body and brought back to it as jewellery.
Challenging norms, sparking conversations. Celebrating diversity, reclaiming body narratives.
Defying standards and embracing uniqueness.
Nipples as symbols, breaking chains.
With her Bachelor‘s project A Matter of Nipples, Vivian Manzardo invites the viewer to question and challenge still-existing taboos around women‘s bodies, transforming nipples into brooches to be worn and explored.
Women’s bodies are still both the most sexualized and the most censored in today’s Western societies. Media and Social platforms perpetuate the ideal of perfect, flawless and ageless bodies, offering solutions for so-called imperfections, instead of teaching body positivity and self-acceptance. Even though it affects both sexes, the pressure issued by modern beauty standards appears to take a greater toll on women.
Today, women’s bodies are still clouded in taboos: since the beginning of puberty, society teaches them to hide their periods, sexuality and bodies and even to be ashamed of them. Among the many taboos, nipples might represent the most controversial: though looking almost identical to their male equivalent, female nipples are considered indecent because of the sexual connotation men give them.
Since the beginning of history, nipples and breasts have been in the headlights: they have been worshipped and cursed, used by men as symbols for their sins and as objects of their pleasure. The last century in particular has had the breast squeezed, flattened and thrust upwards, to match ever-changing beauty standards dictated by a patriarchal society, that never had much consideration for women’s own thoughts and feelings.
For most of human history, more than half of the world’s population has been systematically excluded from the books, as if their experiences did not matter. This selective memory robbed not only women but also men of the ability to obtain a truthful picture of the past. Through the development of women’s history, new female voices have joined historical accounting, shedding light on the patriarchal mechanisms that are still intrinsic in modern Western societies. Such mechanisms objectify women, transforming them into an Other, an object for men to desire. Taboos around their bodies reinforce this alienation and prevent us from achieving gender equality.
With her bachelor’s project, Vivian Manzardo decided to address one of the many taboos around the female body: she chose to make it “A Matter of Nipples”. Her goal is to address the taboo surrounding nipples (especially female nipples). To show how similar and yet diverse this little part of our body can be, as unique as a fingerprint and yet always recognizable as such.
The collection consists of 6 brooches, one of which is intended for the wall. Each brooch contains one or more porcelain tiles, which are the precise imprint of a total of 50 different nipples (which is still only a sample of the actual existing diversity). Through the replication, the glazing and the square shape, the origin of the imprints can no longer be directly seen. The nipples are taken out of their original context and can only be recognized as such after a closer look. This abstraction is meant to induce the viewer to come closer and perhaps even touch the jewellery before realising that it is made of nipples.
The big wall brooch, instead, is an open invitation to consciously confront this taboo. The almost scientific presentation is meant to highlight the diversity and uniqueness of nipples, depicting the different shapes, sizes and colours.
