As controversy raged over the racing benefits of high-tech swimwear at the recent World Swimming Championships in Rome, an exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum launched the store of swimwear – from neck-to-knee to dare-to-bare.
A century ago, swimming could be a risky business. It wasn’t that most people couldn’t swim (although that was likely). It wasn’t even the risk of bluebottles or deadly box jellyfish. In fact, a swimmer was probably at greatest risk of sinking and drowning under the weight of a cumbersome, neck-to-knee swimsuit.
“If you were a woman your costume would include shoes, stockings, bloomers, a dress with a belt to prevent it rising up in the water, and a hat made from oiled skins,” explains Penny Cuthbert, co-curator of a new exhibition Exposed! The Story Of Swimwear at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.
But in 1907, Australian swim champion and vaudeville star Annette Kellerman changed forever the look of women’s swimwear when she donned a less-cumbersome man’s woollen swimsuit during her aqua-ballet routine. While she respectfully covered her legs in woollen tights, it wasn’t enough to stop the outrage. Then, in a performance on a Boston beach sans tights, Kellerman was arrested for indecent exposure. But Kellerman, who made 12 international movies between 1909 and 1924, remained an advocate for practical, one-piece swimsuits and the style caught on.
Ever since, Australians have been blazing the trail for swimwear fashions, giving them affectionate names such as “sluggos”, “budgie smugglers”, “rashies”, “togs”, “cossies” and “boardies”. We’ve also given the world iconic beachwear brands such as Speedo, Tigerlily, Zimmermann, Mambo, Rip Curl and Billabong.
“It has become symbolic of our optimistic, sun-drenched lifestyle,” says Cuthbert, explaining the global appeal of Aussie beachwear. The Maritime Museum’s brief covers all water activities but, unexpectedly, it also now boasts the largest collection of swimwear in Australia.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting excited about a day at the beach in the 1920s when you’d swelter in a thick woollen swimming costume. But before Lycra transformed swimwear, ribbed wool jersey was the most common material for it and Australia’s wool industry did a roaring trade. When Sydney’s MacRae Knitting Mills developed a Racerback swimsuit in 1928, a staff member dubbed it Speedo, and the most famous brand in swimwear was born.
That year, Swede Arne Borg popularised the Racerback when he won a gold medal in it at the 1928 Olympics. Since then Speedo has been synonymous with speed, most recently at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when its sleek, performance-enhancing LZR Racer bodysuit helped Michael Phelps win eight gold medals.
However, swim fashions haven’t all been about speed. The secret of their allure has been the way they tease with the naked body underneath. “It does have a very voyeuristic element,” says Cuthbert. “Swimwear pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable to reveal in public and every decade has pushed the boundaries further. It’s been a gradual reveal over time.”
In 1946 came the atomic quake that shook the fashion world: the bikini, a costume of such brevity that its designer Louis Reard described it as something that could be “pulled through a wedding ring.” Australians took to the costume – named after the Micronesian atoll where the US conducted nuclear tests – with gusto. On Queensland’s Gold Coast, designer Paula Stafford set up a Bikini Bar offering customised bikinis in 24 hours. “A holiday to the Gold Coast just wasn’t complete without a Paula Stafford bikini,” recalls rival designer Brian Rochford. These racy designs didn’t please everybody in the 1950s and ’60s. On the Gold Coast and in Sydney, beach inspectors made headlines for sending girls off the sands for being immodest. Such scandal and titillation was, of course, the whole point of ever-racier swimwear, both for observers and for the rebellious teen baby boomers who took to them.
Rochford, synonymous with swimwear design from the late 1950s, remembers: “When we came in, mothers and daughters wore the same clothing; we changed all that. We made young swimsuits, they didn’t have bra cups in them.”
In the ’70s beachgoers “let it all hang out”, and after the Brazilian G-string, it was hard to fathom how much more minimalist fashion could be. Now it’s no longer how small, but how far, as designers push swimwear from beachwear to everyday leisure wear and even a part of evening wear.
“It’s now the starting point of the Australian summer wardrobe,” Seafolly head designer Genelle Walkom says. “A woman is quite active in it; she exercises in it, she’s walking the dog in it, she might wear it with shorts or jeans.”
Modern brands such as Seafolly, Tigerlily, Zimmermann and Jets reflect this in the stylish one-piece costumes they have created in homage to Kellerman as part of the Maritime Museum’s exhibition: modishly worn with tight pants, or affixed with beads and sequins. Who could have imagined this fate, even when Paula Stafford was pushing the bounds of public decency back in the 1960s?
Zimmermann designer Nicky Zimmermann explains the changing role of modern swimwear. “If a girl is buying designer shoes and designer jeans, then she’s buying designer swimwear – that’s quite a difference from the Brian Rochford era. She might even wear it out to dinner under jeans or a tuxedo jacket. It’s so much about fashion now – to one young girl we can easily sell five swimsuits in one season.”
While high on style, the modern swimsuit is perhaps missing the carefree abandon of the 1970s. “We’re moving back to the future,” says Seafolly’s Walkom, who has been creating swimwear for more than two decades. “When I first started there were no cups. But now it’s about cups, breast shelves, boning and underwires. They are quite structural pieces.”
It’s a look that honours the movie starlets of the 1950s and is also conservative. After a century of daring and baring, it appears many of us remain fundamentally modest. Says Zimmermann, “Swimwear is the most exposed, one would hope, that you ever are in public – and a great, well-cut swimsuit can help.” It seems the secret of a top swimsuit is an artful combination of reveal and conceal.
Breaking the Speedo limit
“Sluggos”, designed for Speedo in 1960 by Peter Travis to ride low on the hip, are sometimes derided as “budgie smugglers” because of the way they coddle the wearer’s male anatomy.
Beloved in Europe and scorned in the US, they’re still proudly worn on Aussie beaches by infants, 80-year-olds and lifesavers.
Sean Ashby, founder of AussieBum men’s swimwear, doesn’t believe Australians regard themselves as highly conservative, “but you will always have a divide between the boardie boys and the ones in sluggos.” AussieBum, which turned over $22m last year, began in 2001 after Ashby found he could no longer buy sluggos from Speedo – new offshore owners decided they didn’t have sufficient global appeal.
So what now? Boardshorts, beloved by surfers for not chaffing while sitting on a board, are declining in popularity, reports Ashby. They are being overtaken by boxer-style swimwear made famous by Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale. This “squared-off leg,” says Ashby, is the prevailing fashion trend for summer 2010. Regardless of the whims of fashion, one thing remains clear: “There will always be a market for sluggos.”
Exposed! The Story Of Swimwear, Australian National Maritime Museum to October 25, then tours. Website
Source: Qantas The Australian Way September 2009