The Swimsuit

Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk

Christine Schmidt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857851253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk documents the modern swimsuit's trajectory from men's underwear and circus/performance wear to its unique niche in world fashion. It emphasizes the relationship between fashion, media, celebrity, sport and the cultivation of the modern body. This fascinating book provides an historical, sociological and cultural context in which to view how the swimsuit - and Australia, the country that significantly influenced its modern form - migrated from the cultural and colonial periphery to the centre of international attention. In addition, the book offers new perspectives on national histories of the swimsuit and investigates how traditional European fashion centers have opened up to new markets and modes of living, bringing together influences from around the globe. The Swimsuit is essential reading for students, scholars, and the general reader interested in fashion, popular culture, history, media, sport, and gender studies.

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A Template for New World Fashion

The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk documents the modern swimsuit’s trajectory from men’s underwear and circus/performance wear to its unique niche in world fashion. It emphasizes the relationship between fashion, media, celebrity, sport and the cultivation of the modern body. In addition, the book offers new perspectives on national histories of the swimsuit and explains how traditional European haute couture has opened up to new markets and modes of living, bringing together influences from around the globe.

As a brief form of clothing, any study of swimwear is closely aligned to beauty, thinness and the fashion body—its changing shape and bodily ideals. The swimsuit is an equalizer stripping away the wearer’s social markers; it results in the body itself being placed on centre stage and is linked to changing social mores and codes of morality and decency. Body exposure battles raged from the 1900s onwards with men and women demanding the right to reveal their bodies in streamlined swimsuits in public spaces. Arguably, the bared body has led to an increasing preoccupation with physical fitness, dieting and, more recently, cosmetic surgery to achieve a level of physical beauty suitable for wearing a swimsuit. Australian women including Annette Kellerman (early 1900s), Sue Becker (1960s–1970s) and Elle Macpherson (1990s–) have gained international reputations as experts contributing to the production of physical fitness programmes that instructed women on how to achieve a body worthy of public display.

This book will consolidate the links between swimwear and celebrity and examine the impact of stars including Annette Kellerman and Esther Williams upon this modern leisure industry. Tracing this fashion revolution over 100 years reveals that key contributors to the creation and popularization of the swimsuit, and the modern ideals of youth and physical beauty, transcended social barriers to gain notoriety and commercial success through unique personal styles and talent. These individuals, including stage and film stars, fashion models, sports celebrities and beauty queens, herald the democratization of modern fashion that was and is mediated through the entertainment industries. Importantly, these factors signal how the fashion system has evolved as a result of geographic, social and cultural influences, in particular the convergence and cross-pollination between individuals and global currents as fashion moves ever closer to ordinary life.

The Swimsuit tells the interesting story of a lost celebrity—Kellerman—who popularized the one-piece swimsuit in the early 1900s, and how famous swimwear and surfwear labels such as Speedo, Quiksilver and Billabong that originated in Australia developed out of a quintessential lifestyle of sand, sea and sunshine. While it reinforces the cultural mythology of a nation of bronzed, athletic swimmers and bikini-clad blondes, it relates the history of competitive swimming and surfing and the significance of sport to our understanding of swimwear’s increasingly central place in contemporary globalized culture. Australia’s influential role in the swimsuit’s dynamic progress from the margins to the mainstream is placed within the context of developments in the United States, Europe and, more recently, South America.

Histories of the swimsuit trace how Parisian fashion designers such as Jean Patou and Coco Chanel in the early 1900s initiated the inclusion of sportswear to spring/summer collections, specifically for wealthy clients who vacationed at elite beach resorts and country estates. Since the 1920s, the swimsuit has been depicted in glamorous fashion images for magazines such as French and British Vogue as clothing an ideal woman, one of the elite few who may summer in Deauville or Antibes. Photographer George Hoyningen-Huené’s stark neoclassical fashion images depict this woman as sophisticated, elegant and urbane. And it is also Paris in 1946 where the bikini makes an explosive launch modelled by Folies Bergères dancer Micheline Bernardini. Although the bikini was not immediately adopted by any nation, it suited the European jet set’s relaxed attitude to skimpy swimsuits and nudity and, as a result, was seen on the beaches of the French Riviera from the 1950s and 1960s, and epitomized by film icons such as Brigitte Bardot.

The story continues across the Atlantic where the American West Coast manufacturers including Jantzen, Cole of California, B.V.D. and Catalina were a driving force behind the mass production of swimwear in the 1920s and ’30s. Hollywood joined forces with these manufacturers simultaneously to spearhead studio publicity and promote stylish swimsuits endorsed by stars as a new form of accessible glamour. Moreover, films became vehicles for popularizing particular designs; for example, when Dolores Del Rio ‘made fashion news by introducing the two-piece bathing suit’ to audiences in her screen appearance in Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1933 (Tapert 1998: 144). The Golden Age of Hollywood saw a passing parade of beauties clad in equally stylish swimsuits and for some, such as Esther Williams, it is hard to imagine them fully clothed. Alongside this pin-up glamour, the American style associated with designer sportswear came into its own in the 1940s when, due to World War II, accessibility to Parisian fashion became limited. Unlike French couture with its ‘grand style and the refinements of traditional fashion authority,’ it was modern, practical and in tune with ‘the lives of women of their era’ (Martin 1998: 9); the swimsuit was naturally included in this wardrobe. Claire McCardell, arguably one of the most influential of a new breed of American designers, created a number of innovative swimsuits in wool jerseys that were both functional and reflected ‘an honest delight in the body’ (ibid. 31). Together with resort wear designers such as Tina Leser, she led the way for more casual wearable fashion. Similarly, as opposed to glamour studio shots, photographers such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell captured models wearing body-baring swimsuits in exotic location shots rejoicing in their athletic sensuality.

By the early 1960s, there was a further diversification of types or models. Teenage beach party movies featuring wholesome Californian surfer girls and boys in saccharine sweet summer adventures played alongside the more assertive grown-up action of the Bond girl. The memorable Ursula Andress in Dr. No striding from the sea in a daringly brief white bikini accessorized with belt and hunting knife foregrounded a new type of active glamour that was vigorous and youthful and removed from the sleek, sultry glamour of legendary film sirens such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. The look has endured and been replicated for new audiences in the 2000s with Halle Berry, once again, emerging from the waves—this time in an orange bikini with knife on hip in Die Another Day.

Moving through the decades of the twentieth century, the swimsuit was refined and integrated into the fashion system. National influences, in particular French and American (and more recently Brazil), pinned the swimsuit into position creating an evolutionary path mapped with beautiful women and sunny locations. Italian and French fashion designers and brands including Pucci and Eres (1960s), Dior (1970s), Chanel, Hervé Leger and a number of key ateliers from the 1990s have continued to make their mark on the luxury swimsuit. Cruise/resort collections and the swimsuit are now staple products of major fashion brands targeting wealthy travellers as they migrate to and from glamorous exotic locations around the globe. In 2004, IMG World (a global sports, fashion and media business) launched the inaugural Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Swim in Miami to showcase swim and beach fashions from the best swimwear brands—in particular those from America, Australia and Brazil. The Sports Illustrated yearly swimsuit issue has added momentum to the swimsuit’s popular appeal and increased the level of exposure for cover models including Christie Brinkley, Elle Macpherson and Tyra Banks. Similarly, swimsuit editorial is assured coverage on page one or three in newspapers, whereas other fashion stories are often omitted altogether, positioning the swimsuit as an ongoing newsworthy garment. One thing that is missing from the narrative of a garment that came in from the cold is the extent to which the swimsuit’s history is also an Australian story. This book redresses the balance in order to show how a peripheral country may have a continuing impact on world fashion through innovation at the margins.

The study of swimwear reflects a fascinating aspect of contemporary fashion as the swimsuit, like blue jeans, has become an essential part of the history of sartorial popular culture. It challenges traditional socio-historical trends with aquatic performers, swimmers and those on the fringe, rather than the aristocracy, marked as early adopters. Consequently, it is a garment that conforms to dress scholar Joanne Eicher’s description of the types of clothing worn by ‘ordinary people’ and an example of ‘world fashion’ that includes generic forms, such as jeans, in recognition of fashions that have not emanated from a central hub such as Paris (1995: 300). These garments represent a template for new world fashion initially fabricated for functional purposes ( jeans, workwear; swimsuits, sport and leisurewear) that have come to symbolize freedom, individuality and rebellion. There is a belief that jeans are egalitarian, expressing honesty, neutrality and authenticity (Maynard 2004: 47–8)—all sentiments that are a fit with the swimsuit. Equally relevant, all jeans and swimsuits are not the same, and the nature of global attire—the types and complexities of a ‘supposed universality of dress’—is challenged by marked differences in ‘fabric quality, stitching and, to an extent, pattern’ (ibid. 41), and more importantly, where it is worn and by whom.

The swimsuit and its position as a key global garment in today’s fashion industry has been shaped by the important role of designers, multinational clothing corporations, syndicated fashion magazines, film, television and the Internet. This process of globalization can be seen as an integration and interconnectedness that ‘transcends national and political boundaries, limits and viewpoints’ (Kunz and Garner 2006: 5). However, there is an increasing focus on creating marketable and desirable national images and identities to compete in a global marketplace. Anholt (2007: 20) reports, ‘Places with unusual or distinctive traditional or invented cultural products [to] “punch above their weight” in world affairs, and use their culture to communicate more of the real richness of their society to ever more distant audiences.’ The concept of nation or place branding and how fashion can be linked to this identity is also covered in this book, which will use Australia as a case study to illustrate how fashion designers and brands have become syn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A Template for New World Fashion
• 2 Testing the Waters: Morality and Undressing the Body
• 3 Show and Tell: Popularizing the Swimsuit
• 4 Body Business: Beauty Made to Measure
• 5 Going for Gold: Sport and Fashion
• 6 Shaping Up: The History and Development of the Swimsuit’s Integration into the Fashion Industry
• 7 Branded Nation: A Place in the Sun
• Notes
• References
• Index