Along with the bikini, the 1950s saw the rise of one-piece structured ‘corsetry’ swimsuits designed to accentuate the ‘right’ curves of a woman’s body by incorporating boning in the bodice, much like a corset, and creating a Merilyn Monroe-like figure with a flat belly, slim waist, and an impressive bust, a regression in terms of women’s liberation if you ask me. In other words, bikini’s reception was gradual, and it took quite some time for it to become an everyday piece of swimwear for the majority of women as its ban from many beauty pageants and fashion magazine of the era testifies. According to Vogue magazine, it was during the 50s that swimwear started signifying a ‘state of dress, not undress’ pointing towards a radical change in morals regarding clothing and nudity. The developments in fabric technology had also a positive effect on the popularization of bikini as polyester, lastex, and acrylic all have qualities fitting for swimwear. We should also keep in mind that this was the golden era of Hollywood with its immense cultural influence in the context of which the notion of sex symbol was created. Furthermore, the post-war years saw the popularization of beachwear and resort style as a distinct and sizable marketing category. Bring in mind Christian Dior’s floral swimwear collection of the time! Around the same time, the first Speedo made of elastic nylon was created and widely worn at competitive swimming events initially by men and then by women too.

And then it was the 1970s during which swimsuits became smaller and smaller! But an important historical development had been under its way already since the 1960s culminating in the 1970s in a sort of a cultural and social revolution set to question decade-long implicit assumptions about social roles and power imbalance! Yes, you guessed right, it was the time of the second wave of feminism that could not but influence the course of the history of fashion. Initially located in the USA in the heated political context of the anti-war, counterculture, abolition, and civil rights movements, this social movement also known as the women’s liberation movement soon spread throughout the world. Sprung out of the so-called conscious-raising groups that brought together everyday women in a safe space that provided them with the opportunity to discuss freely their challenges that they were facing due to their gender in a patriarchal society, these activists soon realized that their personal experiences and problems were shared by many other women, that rather than constituting individual cases, these were actually the manifestations of deep social and political structures that permeated the American society. However, the second wave of feminism differs significantly from the abovementioned first wave in terms of its political philosophy and its political claims. In particular, this movement had a much broader activist agenda that included reproductive rights, such as the right to contraception and the right to abortion, gender-based violence, especially domestic violence and marital rape, and sexuality, like the role of pornography in relation to women’s status, among others. 

When it comes to its political and social tenets, the existential philosophical treatise The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, published in France in 1949, set in motion a totally new way of thinking about gender. The famous quote ‘one is not born a woman, but becomes one’ was one of the first theorizations of the social construction theory of gender, the theory that maintains that gender is a historically situated and social specific construction, something changeable over time and across space that has nothing to do with an eternal essence in terms of either body or psyche. Second wave feminists drew from this insight the conclusion that if womanhood is anything but natural, then it follows that patriarchy itself is a contingent sociopolitical regime and not the natural order of things. To put it simply, things can change! This was ‘a women’s liberation movement’ that paradoxically put into question each and every term of this phrase. Womanhood is both a social construct and the subject of political mobilization. But who is the woman that one is talking about? Especially in the 1970s, an internal criticism was put forward against the mainstream feminism movement from all those ‘women’ on the fringes of womanhood represented by the movement, namely the black and indigenous feminists and the lesbian feminists, among others. The while middle-class American heterosexual feminism was under attack and this led to the realization that not only women are different from men, but also the very woman is split. If the first wave put forward its claim on the basis of the sameness of women with men, the second wave not only based its claims on the gender difference between men and women, but it took things further towards an intersectional approach that is based on the internally differentiated notion of womanhood. Even the term liberation was a political question since the second wave aimed at a radical reformation of society and not at a limited set of legal rights as the first wave did.

The 1980s saw the rise of plunging suits that went viral for quite some time, but it was the over-the-top styling of the bathing suits that characterizes this decade more than anything else. Neon colors, animal prints, color blocking, and fancy patterns were stealing the spotlight! But the 80s was also the decade of super-modeling and the leg mania that the later gave birth, which was translated into really high leg cutouts. In addition, mix and match was a trend with women combining different tops and bottoms in order to create their unique looks and the first sun protecting fabrics were introduced into the market. It was in 1985 that Rudi Gernreich created his last bathing suit design, the lesser known but equally provocative pubikini, a tiny V-shaped fabric covering the hips and buttocks but leaving exposed the pubic hair.