The Not-So-Skimpy History of the Bikini

Although they're ubiquitous on today's beaches, bikinis are a far cry from the modest, cumbersome swimming costumes women used to wear. Molly and Cristen discuss the history and feminist implications of the world's skimpiest swimwear in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you?
From housetop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Kristen, This is Molly. Molly. This is something

(00:23):
that I don't really like to say, even though it's fact.
It just sounds so cheesy when you say it out loud.
I can't wait to hear what you're gonna say, Molly. Yes,
it's swimsuits season. I know, and I groaned automatically. It
was just ingrained to me to start groaning. I know,
because a lot of times its swimsuit season is followed
by some kind of thing telling women about how they

(00:44):
need to shape up and get rid of all that
their cellulites, and they don't discuss people when they reveal
their pale bodies to the world. Yeah, there's all sorts
of sub body issues inherent in saying that it swimsuit season.
But we're not going to talk about body issues today.
We're just gonna focus on those pieces of cloths that
stir up both men and women alike every summer. The bapkini,

(01:08):
BUKKINI and I just want to give you a sneak
peek of this podcast where we're going with this. By
the end of it, Christmas is going to point out
that the bikini is the ultimate feminist icon. WHOA, I know,
is your mind blown? I didn't see that coming. I
didn't either. I didn't know I was going to do that.
I've got some work to do then in the next

(01:29):
twenty minutes. All right, Molly, let's get started, because the
history of the bikini, as the title of this podcast implies,
ain't so skimpy. Yes, more coverage than you had thought
possible with the bikini, so many puns to be had.
In this episode. We need to go back in time, Molly,
we need to go back BC. I did not realize this, Molly,

(01:55):
but the first recorded use of a form of bathing
costume was in Greece and three fifty BC. And there's
actually a fourth century mosaic wall in the Piazza ar Marina,
probably saying that I wish I could do an Italian
accent in sicily depicting women wearing bikinis. It's amazing. Yeah,

(02:20):
But as ancient Rome falls and the Greeks and all
the ancient civilizations die, out there comes the rise of
prudishness and shame regarding one's body, and no one went swimming. Yeah,
they would go bathing, you know, but not recreationally swimming
like we think of swimming today. During the eighteenth century,
they'd have spas where men and women would go, you know,

(02:42):
to to the public bathhouses, maybe go take a steam.
It was very therapeutic. It was medicinal. It was not like,
let's go splash around in the water. So it may
seem like we made a huge jump from like BC
to the eighteenth century, but I mean, for a long time,
swimming was frowned upon. It just wasn't something. It was
not the quintessential summer activity as it is today. But

(03:07):
by the mid eighteen hundreds we have the rise of
bathing as a recreational activity. And then in the early
eighteen hundreds, with the rise of bathing or swimming, we
can now call it. I guess we have the emergence
of swimwear because you need you can't just walk into
the water with a full suit on and and I

(03:29):
expect to have a good swim cany moally, Well that's
what they expected the ladies to do, that's right. Because
first swimsuits from when were essentially just like ball gowns.
Me not really, but it was a lot of cloth.
And to avoid the poofy ballooning of a skirt that
could happen as you get in the water, they would
weigh down. They put weights in the hymns of the

(03:52):
skirt to make sure that you know, you weren't gonna
show any shin. You know, the shin is the most
raw part of the leg, so you must hide it
at all times. And I don't know about you, Christim,
but swimming with weights on doesn't sound like much fun,
does It sounds like a recipe for disaster and fun.

(04:12):
Side side note to all of this, we actually have
the railroad to thank for all of this when we're
being invented, because it was with the railroad that people
could actually flock to the seasides to go to the beach,
thus popularizing the beach activities, thus necessitating the bathing suit. Now,
in addition to waiting down the swimming dress, uh, they

(04:35):
just went to all sorts of links to make sure
that women never had to be seen in a bathing costume.
There was this one cool thing that Slate pointed out
where it was like a dressing room on wheels, and
you'd put the woman in the dressing room wheels, she'd
put on her bathe and dress and they would wheel
her in the little room like down to the ocean
so she could get in the ocean without anyone seeing her,

(04:55):
and she could have a dip. And when she was
ready to get out, they'd wheel the thing up and
pick her up and take her back so that that she
could put her clothes on. And this was actually called
a bathing machine. Yeah, and it's you know, women just
could not be seen on a beach. Yeah, it was
a very it was very private thing, which makes sense.
This was a Victorian era, the height of prudishness. But

(05:16):
then we have some some women who are really tired
of being weighted down in the water because first of all,
it was probably dangerous and probably really hard to tread water,
whilst they pointed out some women died um. But then
in nine seven we have Australian swimmer and silent film
star Ant Kellerman who has had enough well she needed

(05:39):
to swim for for therapeutic reasons because she had had
polio and rickets, and so she started swimming to make
her legs strong, and she was like, hey, by the way,
it's really hard to make my legs strong when I
can't move them with all these like pantaloons and waded
down skirts and the like that you're making me wear.
So she shows up in America on a Boston beach
and wears, uh, what we would think of today is

(06:01):
a pretty modest swimsuit. It was like a tank top
that you know, had no cutouts, so she's not showing
any chest, she's showing their arms, but you know she's
pretty much covered from neck to thigh essentially. Yeah, and
this is a seven and she is arrested for her
swimsuit at a public beach beach in Boston for indecent exposure.

(06:25):
Can you imagine, no, I mean, if that's indecent exposure,
just imagine if those seven policemen could travel through time
to a two thousand and ten beach, if only they
had our time traveling capabilities that we have on this
podcast technology these days now only we would be remiss
in this discussion if we didn't mention Agnes Beckwith and

(06:47):
a Neck Kellerman, because there were two other women who
really helped pave the way for allowing women to go
swimming in public without having to worry about revealing the bodies,
you know, and being arrested for indecent exposure and all
this stuff. Um and back With, for instance, raced in

(07:08):
the water. She swam against other guys. She raised four
miles from one bridge to Greenwich, and she did that
while wearing the full skirted dress, petticoats, pantaloons and stockings,
kind of demonstrating that even with all of that swimming
costume on she could still keep up with the guys.
She was just as strong as one of the guys.
And then we also have American Amelia Bloomer, who instituted uh,

(07:35):
the Bloomers. We are aware of the clothing Bloomers named
after her that she started wearing to replace having to
wear the full skirt when she swam. So now we're
in the early nine president, and I think that you know,
the contribution of someone like back with it. She shows
that swimming is a sport, it needs a sports like costume.

(07:58):
And so yes, those full bathing dresses gradually faded away. Eventually,
those huge blue pants eventually faded away, and you could wear, respectively,
a one piece thing that covered you know, from you
from your your neck basically to your mid thigh. Yeah.
And and a lot of that had to do with
uh at Kellerman's arrest because that's set off kind of

(08:19):
a whole controversy of well, should she have been arrested
for that? Is that really indecent exposure? So that opened
the door for you know, saying no, that's ridiculous. Women
are drowning in weighted down dresses. So that brings the
rise of wos known as the mayo. Yeah, and by
nineteen fifteen, this was what American women were commonly wearing. Now,

(08:40):
let me just spell myo for you in case you
want to like google images of them, because there's so
many types of them. It's m A I L l
O T. It's the French word for swaddling clothes because
when I think of bathing suits, I think of swaddling clothes. Um,
but you know they were they kind of buried in
size and style, so you could wear one that really

(09:00):
covered you up, you could wear one that was a
little bit more risque. And one pieces. The term one
pieces pretty much replaced mayo, but essentially you're wearing a
one piece. It's a mayo. Yes, Now into the twenties
and thirties, we do have the emergence of the two piece,
not the bikini though. People two pieces a separate thing
from the bikini because these two pieces covered up the navel.

(09:23):
They would they would come up and sit pretty high
up on on your natural waist and then you would
have a pretty pretty covered, pretty solid covering for the
top to to make this this two piece and uh
and I love this. By the end of the nineteen twenties,
we had a lot of different novelty suits that were
associated with two pieces. So you'd have like a sailor

(09:46):
themed suit or maybe a leopard printed suit. Like they
really went wild with this with with these new this
new swim where provided you didn't see the navel. And
that's what I think. It is so funny. I mean
everyone has a belly button, you know, but largely Hollywood
influenced this because the Hollywood Hayes Code prohibited actresses from
showing their navel. Yeah, and so I mean you think

(10:08):
about all those starletts who are wearing those two pieces.
They you know, we're they seem so sexy, but they're
not showing their belly button of all things. Now I
should mention that in the thirties we do have the
arrival of the bowhouse. But the bow house is probably
not something that you have ever really seen on many

(10:29):
beaches because the bowhouse style was basically a pair of
swim trunks with suspenders for the top. Very naughty. It's
Christine's favorite bathing suites style, the bowhouse style. Shall you
be sporting it this summer? I shall not? All right,
you know what, it's the history of the bikini we

(10:50):
need to jump ahead to. We just need to do it,
Kristen Small. In order to make the leap to bikini,
we've got to leap across the Atlantic Ocean and go
to France. Great and in France, two men, independently of
each other, came up with the idea for the bikini.
We've got Jacque Coim and Louis Reared. I don't know

(11:14):
how to give that a French a French twist now,
according to Kelly ben Simone, and the name might ring
a bell to any other fans of the Real Housewives
of New York City. But according to Kelly ben Simon,
who wrote the book, actually a good book called the
Bikini Book that traces the history of the bikini. Um.
She says that attractive women back then were known as bombshells.

(11:35):
We know this, and anything intense was atomic, so the
bombshell atomic lingo of the day. So the two frenchmen,
while they're deciding what to call their new skimpy swimwear,
they decided to give them nuclear nicknames. So Jacqueim called
his swimsuit the atom a T O M E like

(11:59):
a bomb. And then Louis Reared introduced on July four,
nine six La Bikini. And that's because the United States
had started atomic testing on the Bikini Atoll, right, So
essentially the bikini is named after bomb testing. Yeah, so

(12:19):
that it is really odd there's a connection between bikinis
and bombs. Bombs, Adam bombs, But he's pepa. His invention
was going to be as revolutionary as the bomb. Now.
I think we should say though, that when Reard wanted
to introduce his bikini to the public, he couldn't get

(12:40):
models to put it on. It was too risque, so
instead he had to hire stripper Micheline Bernardini. That's my
terrible French accent. Micheline Bernardini was a stripper who wasn't
listed to model it and photos of her in this
bikini just circulated throughout the world and the bikini became

(13:07):
a sensation. First of all, of course, it was totally
scandalized in the US, and personally, I would have scandalized
it too, because you no offence micheline, but it kind
of looks like you're wearing a string diaper. Yes, Christa
was not a fan of the first bikini. It was
not the most flattering thing and uh so, yeah, it
was very scandalous. Scars and said no miles aware. And

(13:27):
in the US, wine swimsuit designers said that this was
only for frenchwoman because they were so short. It was
just the only thing they could do to even make
it look like they had any sort of body at all.
But then in the fifties early fifties, we have the
arrival of Bridget Bardo. Embardo looks fantastic in a bikini

(13:48):
and she has very long legs, and uh so there
goes that argument out the window. And gradually they just
become more and more popular. Well, there's the rise of
the private pool, so you don't have to go, you know,
the swimsuit comes into bou because we can all take
the railroads and go to the beach. Now you can
swim in your own backyard and no one needs to
see that you are wearing something that's considered vulgar and

(14:10):
only worn by crude, you know, European types. But even
in nineteen fifties seven, and this is according to an
article that we found in Slate, there was an issue
of the magazine Modern Girl that said, it's hardly necessary
to raise words over the so called bikini, since it's
inconceivable that any girl with tech and decency would ever

(14:30):
wear such a thing. So even though you know seven,
no girl would wear such a thing. By nineteen sixty
five in Time magazine, everyone reports writing them. So it's
a very quick adoption. They go from being very vulgar
two very accepted, extremely quickly. Yeah, nineteen sixty seven, Time
magazine features a survey claiming that sixty of young women

(14:55):
had already gone over to bikinis. And part of that,
again was Hollywood's influence. Why so those codes were relaxed
and one could you know, gas show enabl on the movies.
Think about like the James Bond movie where she comes
out of water in that gold bikini. I mean, there
are very uh strong image images associated with bathing suits
in the n OH. Yeah, Raquel Welsh one million years BC. Yeah,

(15:18):
that's that's quite a bikini bod. But with all this
talk about bikini's molly, there's one thing that we haven't
talked about yet, and that's Sports Illustrated. Now, as I
said at the beginning, you could make the argument, as
Kristen did, that the bikini is a pretty empowering piece
of clothing because it allows you to be free and

(15:40):
go swimming and you're not hindered by you know, your
bloomers or your bathing machine. I do think that body
issues aside that you can tie into it, it is
a pretty cool thing that finally women were allowed to
just swim unencumbered. Yeah. Because, once again, as this often
happens in my podcast research, the notion that I had
going into learning about bikinis was different than the notion

(16:02):
that I had coming out of it, Because when we
think of bikinis today, I feel like it's so loaded
with body issues and fulfilling the male gaze and things
like Sports Illustrated and over emphasis on breast size, all
of this stuff without really appreciating this history and the

(16:23):
struggle for women to literally cast off all of this
extra clothing so that they could swim right alongside men
and not be literally and metaphorically molly weighted down by
the constraints of heteronormative society. Yeah, you get to go
to the beach and actually enjoy your vacation because you're

(16:43):
not stuck in your bathing machine that's rolling you to
the water. You can play on the sand, you can swim.
As Kristen said, without being metaphorically weighed down. I was
pretty impressed with like the history of the bikini. But then,
as krist And just said, we got our brain Sports
Illustrated into it. The first unquote Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition
came out in nineteen sixty four. But it didn't have

(17:06):
anything to do with a bunch of sports editors wanting
to publish photos of scantily clad women. It really had
to do with a lack of sports news to cover.
So they were like, hey, we got some extra editorial
space to fill. I've got an idea, let's put in
a picture of a woman in a bikini. Yeah. It
was all about like going diving in the Caribbean. You know,
there was almost even you know, a little bit of

(17:27):
a story. They didnt even call it the swimsuit issue,
you know, it's just like, hey, here's some there's some
things gonna wear the next time you're in the Caribbean sporting.
It didn't actually become a standalone product until ven when
a very young, very bucksom Tira of Banks and a
very iconic photo graced the cover of the very four

(17:49):
first actual standalone sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Now, I think
the reason that people get so worked up about the
swimsuit issue is that very quickly they abandoned tradition, all
ideas of what a swimsuit is. Like Sheryl Tis wears
a see through fishnet one piece, so at that point
you're like, this is not really illustrating something I can
wear while I'm being sporting on the beach. This is

(18:10):
just you're trying to see through. And then in we
have Heidi Clum standing there in a quote unquote painted swimsuit,
which is actually Clum just standing naked with some tidy
paint all over her torso. So I think that that's
part of why it's so controversial, is like, you know,
if you can separate all the body issues from the

(18:31):
bikini and then just think, oh, this is something I
wear while I'm on the beach, Like Gabriel Reese, the
volleyball player, competes in a bikini. And so if you
can take this thing that was like, hey, here's something,
here's a healthy woman, perfectly happy in the surf. Let's
have her hold her boobs and paint a bikini on her.
Then yeah, the bikini comes like this objectification of women. Yeah.
I was really surprised also when I was researching this

(18:55):
subject because I and maybe it was just because I
wasn't looking hard enough, but I did not come across
any academic papers as I was expecting to really dissecting,
you know, the feminism and the bikini and kind of
this idea of you know, women being objectified as sex

(19:16):
objects when they put on these bikini, Like what kind
of messages are we sending out to people? Is it
healthy for us to wear these things? All all of
the stuff, you know. But then I came to the
conclusion that maybe that's because it should be an empowering thing,
and it's actually I largely blame UH Sports Illustrated Swimsuit

(19:37):
edition for attaching all these body issues to bikinis, because
I feel like it wasn't until Sports Illustrated that you
have this cultural idea of what a woman should look
like in a bikini. Not to say that, you know,
Sports Illustrated is responsible for body issues that women have
probably had throughout time, um, but I do think that

(20:00):
probably had a lot to do with, um feeling inadequate
when you put one on, even if you're perfectly healthy
and fit right. And I liked this quote from Slate
by Brian Curtis. He wrote, Sports Illustrated editors have always
thought obliged to pretend that the swimsuit issue is a
source of massive national controversy. This is best observed in
their insistence two weeks after the annual issue on printing

(20:21):
correspondence from outraged parents and the smirched librarians. So here
you have this magazine that you know, fifty one weeks
out of the year it's just football, basketball, baseball, et cetera.
And then one week out the year they're like half
naked women. This is so crazy. We're getting banned in
the supermarkets because people aren't don't know what to do,
and I think that they know themselves fed that sort

(20:41):
of spectacle of Hey, this is this is crazy that
we do this. Well, look how radical we are. And
it also overly sexualizes the bikini. What started out as
basically a uniform for a recreational activity, just like you
put on jogging shorts when you're gonna go for a run.
It turns it into, um, something totally eroticized. I mean,

(21:05):
when Molly and I were talking about this earlier, kind
of um coming to terms with I guess the message
that it sends when you are walking down the beach
in a bikini kind of bearing all. Um. It's kind
of hard because I don't think that you can ever
remove the erotic from a naked woman's body. And I
don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think

(21:25):
that that's part of it. But I think it is
unfortunate that the bikini has become such a source of
angst for women, um, whereas it should be I think
a source of empowerment. Yeah, well, on that note, I mean,
I can't say any better myself. We want your thoughts
on the bikini our email addresses mom stuff at house

(21:47):
selfworks dot com. Is the bikini empowering? Isn't the worst
thing that ever happened. Are you excited about summer? Are
you excited that vintage one piece Mayo's are coming back
into style? I know they are. You can find some
really cute Maya's this season, very flattering. Well, send us
your thoughts. Our email is mom stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or if you would like to share
your thoughts with other listeners, you should head over to

(22:08):
our Facebook page. It is Facebook dot com backslash stuff
Mom never told you, or you can just search stuff
Mom never told you in your handy Facebook search bar,
as you probably know. And now we'll do a little
bit of listener mail. We're gonna summarize a little bit
today and not read line by line just because we've
got a lot of email on our Japanese Condom Sales podcast,

(22:33):
very mixed reactions. Um, so let's get into some of them.
So first, let's start with a pretty pretty good correction.
I think we got that we may not have defined
all the terms related to manga and a talk of
culture as narrowly as you might, and so we might
have painted all people who read manga as people who's

(22:57):
love with body pillows, and that is definitely not you.
You can you can obviously make there are tons of
genres and we might have just sort of grouped them
all together for ease of our own podcast, which is
never the way we should do things here. Yeah, and uh,
speaking of the Otaku moa and sleeping with body pillows,
we were called out for jumping on a media trend

(23:18):
that paints an unfair portrait of a very small group
of men in Japan and extrapola set to the entire population,
and that wasn't what Molly and I were trying to do. Admittedly,
there were not that many articles that we found specifically
about the moe associated with the pillow thing, okay um,

(23:42):
but there were a lot of articles going back to
the mid nineties about this idea of Japanese men um
some Japanese men as herbivores versus carnivores, which we talked about.
And if you want more info and that, of course,
you can go back and listen to the podcast. But
I would like to clarify that our research did go
back more than uh the episode of thirty Rock with

(24:05):
James Franco in an article in the New York Times magazine, right,
you know, people thought it was just once one weird
story we had gotten out of Japan and we weren't
taking japan culture as a whole. But as you said,
they go back many years now. Let's also point out
that the title was a little bit tongue in cheek, yes,
because we've got many emails that tried to explain to
us all the reasons why Japanese condom sales might be dropping,

(24:25):
and these included things like the aging of the Japanese population,
the Japanese attitude towards work. One woman wrote in and
she had a Japanese boyfriend. He has to work, you know,
sixty hours a week, and so she's like, of course,
you know you sleep when you get home after that
kind of work week, you may not be having as
much sex um. One person pointed out that the age
in which Japanese youth lose their porginity is actually not

(24:46):
that different than in the US, So obviously, you know,
it's it's a complex as you and the and the
point we were trying to make with the title was
admittedly to get your attention, which it did, but it
wasn't to try to the answer to that question in
the podcast was not, Uh, Japanese condom sales have dropped
because people read manga. That wasn't the point at all.

(25:08):
So thanks to all of you though who wrote in
response to it, whether you had criticisms or praise. Molly
and I need to hear it all um So again,
our email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
You can also follow us during the week on our
Twitter it is mom Stuff podcast. Join us on there,
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(25:30):
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(25:55):
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