Liam Payne strips naked for Hugo Boss: ‘I have basically just shot soft-core porn’
The former One Direction star says his mum will "kill" him - but she'll have to get through us first.
By Will Stroude
Liam Payne has ensured our week has started with a bang after stripping naked for a new Hugo Boss shoot the singer has compared to “soft-core porn”.
Former One Direction star Liam, 26, has shed the clothes to promote his new collaboration with Hugo Boss, the Hugo x Liam Payne bodywear collection, in a jaw-dropping shoot by Mert Atlas and Mac Piggott.
The steamy images see Liam sporting the new underwear range and posing completely nude in a hotel room as model (and world’s luckiest lady) Stella Maxwell is draped across him.
In an exclusive interview with GQ Hype, Liam admits his first professional nude shoot got “very raunchy very quickly”, and that he wasn’t expecting the campaign to get quite so revealing.
“I hadn’t been properly warned about the amount of nudity Mert and Marcus do in their work, let’s say,” he says.
“There was a lot of tequila involved for this shoot. I mean, the first day we did most of the shots for the capsule collection and then the last shots were the box shots for the front of the underwear packaging – which was just like, “Wow, I get to be the guy on the box,” which was a real moment. I’d never take that for granted.
“And then like the next day, we set up again and the model, Stella Maxwell, she’s in the shoot with me. And it just ended up being a lot more naked than I thought it was – and for her as well. She was also naked. And I was just, you know, “Don’t look!” She was naked behind me and I was thinking, “Liam, don’t look whatever you do.”
Photographer Mert Atlas has previously teased the shoot on Instagram this summer with a particularly eye-catching image of Liam with nothing but a curtain protecting his modesty.
Recalling the moment he had to go full-frontal on set to get the shot, Liam says: “I mean it was just a room full of five or six people and a hell of a lot of tequila to get me to this level. I was standing there and all of a sudden it was, ‘Right, OK, take them off.’ I’m like, ‘Really? Take them off? Off, off? Like on-the-floor off? Oh, my God.’
“And there was a real hollow moment afterwards where I was sitting outside smoking a cigarette thinking, ”I have basically just shot soft-core porn.'”
He adds: “For one, my mum is going to kill me. For another thing, I don’t know how far this is going to go… That was just the first shot! It was a lot of fun to shoot but my mum wasn’t best pleased.
“There’s this really raunchy shot of me and Stella, and I showed my mum. She took one look at it and gave me a clip round the ear. All I was thinking was, “I better not tell her about the London buses!”
The Hugo x Liam Payne bodywear collection is available now and you can read Liam’s exclusive interview GQ Hype in full here.