Germany’s biggest-selling paper drops topless models

BERLIN – Germany’s biggest-selling newspaper says it is ending a decades-long practice of commissioning photos of topless female models.

The Bild daily said Monday that “we will show no more topless productions of our own with women.” It said it had increasingly felt that “many women find these pictures offensive or degrading, both here in the editorial department and also among our female readers.”

Bild previously banished topless models from the front page to the inside pages in 2012. Monday’s announcement appeared on page 9, with pictures of a scantily clad woman “in the new, more contemporary style of photography.”

The paper said that, while it won’t produce its own topless pictures, “there are also naked photos that the country talks about” and they’ll still find their way into Bild.