“In the summertime when the weather is hot
You can stretch right up and touch the sky.
When the weather’s fine
You got women, you got women on your mind . . .”
LYRIC BY RAY DORSET—RECORDED BY MUNGO JERRY
Women in the workforce, feminism on the march, the Equal Rights Amendment on the national agenda: the 1970s placed women center stage. On American television, Mary and Rhoda, Maude, Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, and Police Woman made the case for visibility and validity, at home, in the workplace, and everywhere a bra could be burned.
At the beach, women had more choices than ever: cover up, show a little, show a lot, and in select venues, bare it all. Swimwear became softer, less constructed, more touchable. The big three—Jantzen, Cole, Catalina—continued to set trends, but more often followed them. Rudi Gernreich, not done innovating, in 1974 designed a one-piece thong, not topless, cut very high over hips, with a narrow strip of fabric disappearing between the buttocks—a suit to free the body. That same year, Diane Von Furstenberg topped the bikini panty with a bosom bandeau, gathered at the center with halter strings, to lift without lining or foundation. These American designs took some specific inspiration from the free-spirited lindas raparigas of Brazil, who had begun wearing the tanga—the thong bikini—exposing still more of the breasts and derriere. The string bikini, the next big thing, was on its way to Copacabana and Ipanema.
On the Continent, Italian designer Ada Masotti began featuring the bikini in her collections for La Perla in 1971. The same year, Fred Prysquel launched Vilebriquin, out of St. Tropez, with surf-inspired swimwear, in fabrics developed to dry quickly in the sun. A move from Hungary to Tel Aviv prompted Lea Gottlieb to abandon her raincoat business in favor of a new swimwear line, Gottex. The label’s palette was inspired by Gottlieb’s new surroundings: “the aqua of the Mediterranean, the golden yellow of the desert, the blue of Lake Tiberius, the pink of Jerusalem stone, and the greens of the Galilee.” Gottlieb is said to be the first to employ spandex in bathing suits, her success cuing Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent to seek deals to manufacture Gottex swimwear under their names.
Down Under, the MacRae Knitting Mills, based in Sydney, Australia, made socks and hosiery during World War I, before sidestepping to the knitting of competitive swimwear. The renamed Speedo Company, with its boomerang symbol, has maintained a long history with the Olympics, becoming the official licensee for the summer games at Montreal in 1976. Speedos for both genders—tank suits with a french-cut leg and racer-back suits for women, the bikini for men—have been sported by the swimmers and volleyballers at Bondi Beach (from the Aboriginal “boondi,” meaning “water breaking over rock”). Bondi Beach was a flashpoint for outrage over the brevity of the average Speedo. Two-piece suits were forbidden until 1961, when restrictions were relaxed, but still stipulated that “bathers must be clad in a proper and adequate bathing costume.” By the 1980s, taking the sun topless was common, especially at Bondi’s southern end.
Other sea resorts began “making waves” on the Hollywood and “beautiful” people radar: the uncrowded Seychelles Islands off Africa’s eastern coast; exotic Turtle Island in Fiji; Anguilla and the Saints—Martin, Barts, and Kitts—in the Caribbean; Cabo San Lucas at the very tip of Baja California Sur; the resorts on Maui and Kauai; the mythic Bora Bora, one of the Society Islands making up French Polynesia; the Maldives in the Indian Ocean; and the Florida Keys, dotting the ocean off southern Florida. Controversy clung to the beaches at Cape Town, on the southern edge of Africa, “the divide between the icy Atlantic and the warm Indian oceans.” Apartheid divided the country just as the Cape delineated the seas. Change was coming, but slowly, as evidenced by the evolutions in the U.S. Jane Hoffman-Davenport was not the first African-American Cosmo girl, but definitely the first to appear on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine in a swimsuit, for the May 1971 issue. With a certain palpable joy, she wears a “patchwork pouf,” multicolor bikini with a string halter, stylistically related to the trend for crochet and macramé: ethnic authenticity mixed with a coy show of skin.
Cancun, “Mexico’s Splashy New Resort,” as Sports Illustrated called it, was the setting for Cheryl Tiegs’ first outing as the magazine’s cover girl, for the swimsuit issue in January 1975. Her halter bikini, by Anne Collins for Bobbie Brooks, just covers what we are not supposed to see, but her eyes-wide-shut smile assure us that she is the All-American girl at play in the waters of the resort. It also suggests that a super-slender clotheshorse need not apply for S.I. swimsuit royalty; healthy curves are required.
Jacqueline Bisset displayed some healthy curvage in The Deep in 1977. Clad in a bikini bottom with a white, wet T-shirt and scuba mask, Bisset redefined the possibilities of the Hollywood pinup. The 8x10 glamour glossies distributed to G.I.s in WWII, and other interested parties, were suddenly vintage souvenirs. Bisset, somehow more nude than if she were wearing nothing, was enlarged to postersize and subsequently taped or tacked to one hundred thousand bedroom walls.
One iconic pinup poster selling twelve million copies; one top ten TV season of Charlie’s Angels: these two colliding circumstances produced one very big international star. The poster was an inexpensive improvisation—the backdrop, the swimsuit and hair, the head-back smile, the laid-back photographer—that fell into place in a moment, even though there were many takes. The bathing suit, a simple red tank, allowed, shall we say, her nipples to breathe; the colorful Mexican blanket draped behind was suggestive of a weekend on the coast of Baja California, and Coronas with a twist of lime.
Those who take to the beach today have a different relationship to the sun than their counterparts of three, four, and five decades ago. The tanning preparations long ago were to enhance skin tone, then they were to protect from burning, and then they were expected to do both. And they were supposed to be aromatic, suggestive of coconuts and sea breezes. The self-tanners and the bronzers promised a natural glow, but turned orange. There were tanning beds and spray tans, and then the alphabet soup of sunblock letters on a label. It’s been complicated, but the true, lustrous tan from a week in the waves, a Sunday in the sun, is still desirable, as long as it is safe and sane.
A mellow bronze glow is what Bo Derek as Jenny, the titular dream girl in 10, is after on her honeymoon at the Las Hadas resort near Puerto Vallarta. The 1979 comedy—both articulate and slapstick—examines one man’s midlife crisis, as he encounters his “10” and temporarily upends his life to pursue her. Derek’s slo-mo jog on the sizzling Mexican beach was instantly iconic; her tank suit—cut very high at the hip—was an insinuation of nudity, its color a match for Derek’s tanned flesh. Fashion commentator Hal Rubenstein declared that Derek’s “perfect score has never been beaten.”
Also in 1979, Sports Illustrated introduced a very young Christie Brinkley to its swimsuit issue cover, wearing a very low “V”-cut one-piece, bedazzled on sheer black lace mesh. She was “Getting Away From It All In The Seychelles.” The magazine arrived for sports columnist Robb Murray, who was then ten years old. “On the cover? The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. . . . [She] captured my imagination. Look at her. Perfect smile, golden hair—so much golden hair, in fact, that she can grab a handful and pull it up and still have plenty left to cascade lovingly off her tan shoulders and down her arched back. In one image, she changed my life.”
This travel-cade is a memory book of sunlight and starlight, a photographic sampling of all the Hollywood beaches in the world where notable women have played and tanned and posed, and been rendered younger and more beautiful than they really are. The Hollywood fantasy is the gift that keeps on living.
There’s one more opinion to pass on; it’s from Nora Ephron: “Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re 34.”
Everett