Pubes had a brief moment in the sun last year, even if largely an artificial one: genuine body autonomy met the capitalist drive to market whatever it can, and Skims merkins started selling out in seconds. Will the trend last? In mainstream society, probably not. Body positivity is fighting a losing battle – and solutions based in self-hatred are where the real money is. But there’s one industry where the pubic triangle has always been hailed as hallowed ground: arthouse cinema.

While commercial cinema mostly props up normative body hair ideals – shaped by cultural prudishness and Eurocentric, patriarchal standards – arthouse has always sought to disregard ‘perfection’ for authenticity, and been far more willing to risk offending (or boring) the masses. Over the decades, showing bush has become one of the clearest ways to determine that a film is seeking to depict life in its raw, erotic, honest beauty. Michelangelo Antonioni’s foundational arthouse thriller Blow-Up, which took home the Grand Prix at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, is thought to be the first flash of pubic hair in a widely viewed film. Shortly after its release, I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue) – two influential arthouse films by Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman – both featured extensive scenes of full-frontal nudity. 

The ever-controversial Pier Paolo Pasolini reached new heights (or depths) of taboo-breaking in 1975’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. The teenage cast, playing the torture victims of four sadistic elite leaders, spend two-thirds of the run time being paraded nude or semi-nude around a grand mansion, each with a thicket of untrimmed hair between their legs. French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, a darling of the Nouvelle Vague, was notable for his lingering close-ups of women’s pubic hair. His 1985 title Hail Mary included an extremely intimate close-up shot of Myriem Roussel, which was later echoed with a similar shot in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). 

The presence of pubic hair in arthouse cinema has been consistent throughout the decades, notably in the world of Gasper Noé, who released his first film in the late 90s and continues to be one of the most revered directors working today. In 2015, he told Dazed he found it a much more appealing aesthetic. “I was raised in the 70s, watching images of women with the full triangle. When I see images nowadays of girls who are shaven like plastic dolls, I don’t think it’s as pretty. Back to the bush!”

When nudity in the mainstream is intended to be alluring, hair is often left out of the picture entirely. And when commercial cinema does feature a bush, it is usually played for laughs or outright denigration. Think of Anna Faris’s panties being slid down in Scary Movie to reveal a larger-than-life mound of dark curls that her boyfriend literally hedge-trims away, or the Ben Stiller comedy The Heartbreak Kid, where one of the film’s major gross-out moments is the protagonist’s deranged wife revealing a matted tuft of hair between her legs before she pisses on his back. In scenes like these, the characters invariably react with disgust, letting us know that unkempt hair can turn even the most conventionally attractive women into objects of revulsion. 

Because of these stark contrasts in the way it’s been depicted, pubic hair has become a defining hallmark of arthouse cinema. But does this onscreen body trend, designed to communicate unfiltered humanity, still reign supreme in the prestige cinema of the 2020s? Is pubic hair still a reliable indicator of elevated cinema? 

Let’s cast a glance at the films of Cannes 2026. (The Cannes logo, which looks a lot like a wreath of rested pubic hair, unintentionally provides the ultimate symbol of this marriage between prestige films and the bush.) The big picture of this year’s festival is Palm d’Or Winner, Fjord, directed by Cristian Mungiu. The film itself deals with conservatism, starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as two parents who are persecuted by a small-town community for upholding Christian values and practising physical punishment in their home. It’s certainly not a sexy film, but in two scenes we see the nude bodies of elderly residents in a nursing home. There is a brief flash of pubic hair, which functions not as a source of humour or titillation, but as a way of depicting unvarnished reality.

Rounding out the festival’s heavy hitters were Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Lukas Dhont’s Coward and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra. Each of these films – all of which are made by queer directors and concern queer subject matter – shows bush, from Jack Haven’s dark plumage in Teenage Sex... to cocks swinging freely under the curious gaze of La Bola Negra’s outcast antagonist. 

La Bola Negra, especially, brought a distinct humanity to the festival found in few other films. Flittering through time, it follows three men who each have a connection to a lost play. In the contemporary timeline, Carlos González is a rare larger body in a realistic, sweaty sex scene. His cocaine-addicted mother squats and pisses in the garden, her stream catching the sunlight. In the Spanish Civil War timeline, nude corpses pile up. Across the Cannes line-up,  it was noticeable that queer filmmakers were most willing to tackle difficult or ugly subjects.

Given their status as the country most associated with curls down below, it’s no surprise the French held up their side of the bargain, too. Meditative body-swapping thriller The Unknown, from Arthur Harari, provides a platter of corck and balls, overgrown hair, and flaccid nipples. Lea Seydoux gives us a beautiful but honest vision of the female body; the camera never avoids the rolls of her stomach. Gentle Monster, another Seydoux film, features male full-frontal nudity. Moulin, a well-received war biopic about a French Resistance member, shows a happy pubic trail amid scenes of harrowing torture. 

But while there were plenty of pubes on display at Cannes, they still felt strangely out of place in the festival line-up. The festival has massively diversified over the years, as it navigates its purpose in an ever-shifting cinema andscape. Today more than ever, it is a hub for high fashion, celebrity spotting and, above all, the acquisition of future box office hits. This focus on the more commercial side of the film industry has allowed for more mainstream properties to screen, such as this year’s comedy-slasher Victorian Psycho, zombie flick Colony, and bombastic action romp Hope, one of the most divisive Palme d’Or contenders yet.

For a lot of reasons, this is a necessary shift. It makes the festival a little more accessible to wider audiences, and expands the kinds of cinema we consider worthy of celebration. But that growing commercialism means more ‘safe’, sanitised depictions of the body. Filmmakers and production companies want their films to be sold and to be seen, and that means playing by the rules of the studios, which are in turn playing by the rules of proven commercial appeal. Even at the less mainstream end of the spectrum, Cannes audiences were not treated to any Godardian close-ups of tangled hair; there was a distance between camera and cooze, with a few admirable exceptions. Perhaps a once-revolutionary mode of filmmaking has, under the weight of capitalist necessity, become less willing than ever to confront our humanity, pubes and all.