Posh Spice, Kate Moss and Meg Mathews are just some of the figures flashing their nipples in public these days. Shocking? Well, not if you've been looking at a few ads recently.
The humble nipple, once carefully airbrushed out of press and posters and cleverly hidden in TV ads by a conveniently placed prop, has become much more of a regular feature on British screens and billboards in recent years. Nipples now neatly replace full-stops on dotcom ads and stand proud to promote ice lollies.
In one sense, this isn't anything new. Breasts have always been synonymous with advertising - from naughty seaside postcards to Wonderbra ads, they've had a prominent place in British culture.
But for some reason the nipple has always been sacrosanct, a monument to the stubborn conservative streak in British culture.
Everyone remembers the first ad to cause a furore by breaking this particular taboo. The infamous Neutralia shower gel TV spot of 1994 didn't just get the young woman in the shower into a bit of a lather. By introducing audiences to the last frontier of the female form, the Publicis ad earned itself over more than 300 complaints, despite appearing after the nine o'clock watershed.
Some complained that it was degrading to women while others claimed that the soaping action had sexual connotations. Significantly, though, none of the gripes about the ad was upheld. The nipple, it seemed, had arrived.
Now, six years on, another wave of modest-minded crusaders have failed to move the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA's decision not to uphold complaints about the nipple-flaunting work for Vogue.com seems to confirm that a real shift in attitudes has taken place.
And it's not just the ASA that's becoming more relaxed about body parts.
'We receive a lot of these complaints,' an Independent Television Commission spokesperson says. 'But unless it's in poor taste or not relevant to the product, we won't act.'
Could it be that the UK, as a nation, is finally catching up with the Continent, where viewers have been gazing at benippled ads and other racy exposures of flesh for years?
But before we start congratulating ourselves on the country's new-found sense of liberation, it's worth remembering that certain areas of public opinion show signs of lagging behind the ASA on the nudity issue - and this can still have a paralysing effect on advertisers.
Paula Jackson, one of the TBWA/London creatives responsible for the PlayStation 'nipples' campaign, says that she remains unsure whether a bare nipple would be acceptable in a UK ad.
'In our poster, the real nipples were changed for PlayStation symbols to indicate how stimulating the game was,' she says. 'They weren't meant to be overtly sexual.'
That piece of judgment seemed to work well enough. The Play-Station ad didn't receive a single complaint on its way to winning a Grand Prix at Cannes in 1999.
However, the British public is nothing if not inconsistent in its attitude to the human body. As if to remind us that this is the UK after all, Marks & Spencer's new TV campaign, featuring a woman in the buff, has gotten off to a flying start complaints-wise. The ITC is already recording the views of disgruntled viewers around the country - and there isn't even a nipple in sight.
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