Bikini Story. Patrik Alac
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as if someone has breathed life into them. These patches of material on the skin are all at once points of interest, ornaments, even statements. The bikini reveals as much as it clothes, an image which fills many male observers with enthusiasm at the sight of such a transformation.
There is virtually no other item of clothing linked with so many ideas, images, and preconceived impressions. For the bikini belongs to the mythology of today that shapes our concept of reality. In much the same way as the speed of a motorcar bestows on its driver an intoxicating sense of power, and indeed just as a gold credit card has the power to avail its possessor of infinite possibilities, the bikini represents a blank screen open to a person’s imagination. When we acquire such things or begin to use them, some of the magic they have, the scope for imagination that we credit them with, rubs off on us and can change our lives forever.
So when a woman wears a bikini, she is not simply dressed in any old bathing costume. On the contrary, she is wearing a magical thing, something that will transform her and turn her into someone else – like the magic wand in fairy tales. She becomes, you might say, an actress acting out her own life. For those new virtues bestowed on her by the bikini will take her into a world of new and hitherto unseen possibilities, nothing like the ordinary everyday world – a new world in which everything that should happen does happen, and happens as if destined to happen.
But for a bather in a bikini to be able to reach that world of new possibilities, she must find herself enough space to enable the metamorphosis to take place. Only then does the full range of possibilities become fully available to her. This special kind of space is to be found in what have already been described as “aquatic recreational landscapes” – the sands and beaches along the coasts of the continents: a strip of “space” consisting of an almost infinite number of shorelines and banks, where the rules and regulations that normally govern our lives may be put aside, their authority ignored.
Indeed, we all know this aquatic recreational landscape very well. It forms an irreplaceable part of all our lives. Yet, even for a swimsuit as dazzlingly wonderful as the bikini, the process of reaching that landscape and then becoming established in it was neither short nor straightforward.
The first bathers to compete for space on our beaches made their appearance at the end of the nineteenth century. Until that time the sea had been regarded as disturbingly dark and mysterious. So often extolled by classical authors and poets, the sea had become almost entirely hidden in the murky and morbid world that was the medieval experience of human life. It represented the unknown and the perilous. Even to be near the sea was hazardous and unhealthy. People who lived on the coasts kept well clear of the edge, especially when building their houses, in order to be protected from “dangerous currents”, not to mention evil spirits.
A group of ladies around 1910. They wear longish bathing costumes down to the knees – but these are costumes worthy of some outlandish festival with the evident variety of their colours and imagination. In the middle is a Santa Claus with white trimmings. On the left are two characters who might well be jesters at some medieval royal court. And further left is a striped dress meant to be a swimming costume. That there is a close connection between swimwear fashion and lingerie could hardly be made plainer. All the women are wearing shoes (the one fourth from the left seems even to be wearing boxing trainers) and tights.
This belief, that certain areas were injurious to health, lasted right up until the beginning of the twentieth century. It was always said, for example, that the Coliseum in Rome gave off “unwholesome vapours” – of which much was written by Stendhal in his Promenades dans Rome. Henry James’ Daisy Miller contained something similar: the eponymous heroine dies after a night of madness spent in an ancient amphitheatre.
The seaside was prescribed as treatment only for those suffering from incurable illnesses. On the periphery of the unknown, beyond what had long been presumed as the Edge of the World, the Abyss and the Void, it was not so much a seaside resort as a last resort. In much the same vein, during the seventeenth century to plunge head-first into the sea three times was held to be an efficacious remedy for rabies.
But during the nineteenth century, the genuine medical advantages of residence beside the sea began to be extolled. Salt water, well shaken until foamy, was declared to have health-giving qualities and prescribed for anaemia, nervous conditions, convalescence after fractures or sprains, asthma, and skin diseases. Such “cures”, however, were strictly science-based (as indeed was just about everything during the nineteenth century), and a patient was required to follow very precise instructions as listed. You might thus be required, with your feet in water that was neither too shallow nor too deep and reasonably close to the beach, to practise lithe movements for precisely five minutes, and then to stride forward boldly until the water reached the level of your ears, and to remain in that position for as long as possible without moving. Having finally left the water, it would then be imperative to restore your badly slowed circulation by means of stretching exercises on the beach.
It is rather like what happened when public services began on the trains. Passengers were advised to protect themselves from being thrown around by the high speeds by strapping cushions on the stomach and back. Again it was a matter of protecting the body from the terrors of a new and unknown environment.
Bathers on the beach at Deauville around 1925. The swimming costume that looks like a long shirt reaching down to the hips is close-fitting and emphasizes the form of the body. The woman with the rather anxious air about her is slim and obviously quite different from the bathers of 1900. In the distant background it is possible to discern the sheets that had replaced wicker beach-chairs and voluminous beach tents. This is the beginning of the assault by the masses on beaches all over the world.
Beachwear fashion at the beginning of the 20th century. Six women gracefully adopt a uniform pose aboard a boat. They wear swimming-caps (one of which is decorated with a feather) and one-piece costumes inspired by sportswear that was particularly fashionable at the time. With the right leg crossed over the left, they bring their hands together over their right knees. The costumes, which only just cover the thighs, clearly show the new minimalist tendency in swimwear fashion that was hereafter also to be seen in various sports. All six are wearing makeup – notably using lipstick to alter the shape of their mouths – including whitening their facial skin to contrast with their darkened lips, giving a doll-like look that is enhanced by the hair jammed under the swimming-caps and the rather fixed smiles. This is evidently a time when innocence had begun to be taken less seriously as the body might be revealed more and more openly.
Costumes for bathing were first designed for practical use on the beach and in the sea. Initially, there was a great difference between beachwear and costumes for the swimming-pool or inland lake. The latter was modelled virtually precisely on items of clothing that were stitched together layer upon layer as worn by women at the end of the nineteenth century in a town or village.
Therefore, at that time, trips to the seaside were by no means necessarily associated with swimming. In any case, to enter the water at all usually meant no more than a headlong plunge before coming out again – literally a “quick dip”. This is why the first “bathing costumes” were as full and as ornate as everyday clothing, and designed to cover as much as possible. Another function was to keep the bather warm, whether on the beach or in the water, for which reason most were made of thick material with insulating properties, such as cotton. Bathing costumes were certainly not meant for ogling.
Until World War I, the distance across the beach and into the water might be traversed in a “bathing machine”, a sort of changing-cubicle on wheels that was pushed into the water; the bather might then jump from it straight into “the sea”.
These photos clearly demonstrate how beach-wear fashion has changed since the early days. The need not to offend contemporary views on modesty, the difficulties of making bathing costumes in which it was actually possible to swim – these were the great problems that real creativity had to solve. At the same time it should be noted – in light of these photos of an era now long gone – that it was at this point that the space of the beach began to be appreciated. The somewhat vaudevillian