Therme Group is proud to announce a publishing collaboration with photographer, author, and cultural documentarian Mikkel Aaland to print and distribute Naked Sweat, alongside a facsimile edition of Aaland’s influential 1978 book Sweat.

Together, the two books form a dialogue across nearly five decades—linking one of the earliest contemporary explorations of global sweat-bathing traditions with a new, visually rich work that reflects on sauna culture’s modern resurgence and future relevance.

Originally published in 1978, Sweat was among the first books to document sweat bathing as a shared human ritual across cultures, introducing Western audiences to Finnish saunas, Russian banyas, Islamic hammams, Japanese mushi-buro, and Indigenous sweat traditions. The facsimile edition preserves the original work in its authentic form, offering new generations access to a foundational text in bathing culture. Naked Sweat builds on that legacy. Drawing on more than five decades of research, travel, and immersion, the new book examines the global renaissance of sauna and sweat bathing through photography, essays, and personal reflection. At its core is a simple but powerful framework: sweat bathing as a sustainable cultural system grounded in three interdependent pillars—the physical, the social, and the spiritual. The book features a foreword by Leonard Koren, founder and publisher of WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, whose pioneering work helped shape contemporary discourse around bathing, design, and sensory culture.

For Therme Group, the collaboration reflects a long-term commitment to publishing and supporting works that position bathing as essential public culture. Following Therme’s support of Social Sauna, Jane Withers’ influential exploration of contemporary communal sauna culture, Sweat and Naked Sweat together deepen and extend that conversation—bridging historical roots, lived experience, and contemporary practice.