There is a simple, innocent freedom about being naked in an appropriate setting, whether it's showering, sleeping, or enjoying quality time with your spouse. However, in other settings, to be naked is to be humiliated, embarrassed, or ashamed. I still have that recurring dream about showing up for some final exam completely naked. What is THAT about?
Before they sinned, Adam and Eve "were both naked, and they felt no shame." (Genesis 2:25). However, after they made the catastrophic choice to eat from the tree God had commanded them not to eat from, they are now hiding behind trees, afraid and ashamed. As God comes looking for them in this tragic game of hide-and-seek, he asks them a haunting question: "Who told you that you were naked?" (3:11)
It's a piercing question that bespeaks the loss of innocence, the doing of something that cannot be undone. It's a quasi-rhetorical question, because the answer of course, is "No one." No one had to tell Adam that he was naked, it was the consequence of eating the forbidden fruit. Contrary to the serpent's promise of it offering life, power, and freedom to them, it only brought guilt, shame, and alienation.
Adam and Eve's solution to their nakedness is sewing together fig leaves to cover their private parts. In much the same way, we futilely attempt to cover ourselves through our human striving -- through our accomplishments, possessions, appearance, and status.
Yet God offers them (and us!) a better way. The most moving part of this story is at the end, when God clothes them in "garments of skin" (3:21) and sends them on their way out of the garden. Presumably, some innocent animal had to die as a consequence for their sin.
Yet this tragic ending points to God's future, hopeful provision for his people through the substitutionary atonement of the sacrificial system (I sin and a lamb dies in my place), which would eventually find its ultimate fulfillment in the coming of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, the One who was crucified naked that we might be clothed in the garments of salvation.