LIKE MOST SWIMMERS from less buttoned-down eras, Leander crossed the Hellespont naked, knotting his cloak around his head before plunging in to visit his lover on the other side. When you’re a myth, you can do anything. A few millennia later, Gertrude Ederle did it in real life, slipping out of her homemade silk bra while crossing the English Channel in search of comfort, not romance. Male swimmers were permitted to cross with nothing protecting their masculinity but a layer of grease. The images come to mind during my own adventure because the water feels so soft and pearly, I wouldn’t mind being naked myself. It’s how I prefer to swim when I’m alone, sliding through the stream minus even the barest of barriers. So primal. So impractical. So I’ve thought carefully about what suit to bring from my very well-stocked collection: a strapless number that frees my shoulders and makes me feel like Esther Williams? A two-piece halter-top that might let me do an Ederle to get up close and personal with the Hellespont? A soft little bandeau with sequins (body bling; I like glitter) on the front? In the interest of propriety and pace, I’ve settled on a speed suit—purple, so I’d know it was me. While the unforgiving second skin won’t hide the kebabs I’ve consumed since arriving in Turkey, it won’t slow me down or chafe me, either. Better yet, I got it online, without ever having to go to a dressing room.
Want to see a grown woman—any woman—act like the victim in a horror film? Two words: bathing suit. Three more: trying one on.
“I think the day you go to buy a bathing suit is the day that even women who like to shop feel like committing suicide,” says Nora Ephron, coauthor of the play Love, Loss and What I Wore, which X-rays our feelings about clothing. Calling swimsuits clothing may be charitable. “Underwear,” proclaims Patricia Marx drily in the New Yorker. But “unlike underwear, they do not work behind the scenes. Bathing suits are the whole show.” Worse yet, she writes, “You know who looks fabulous in a bathing suit? A mannequin. Also, a hanger.”
Marx, who is trim enough not to worry, swam laps naked while a student at Harvard because, she says, “I was presexual. I assumed everyone was there just to swim. No one was looking.” Years later she mentioned that to a male college friend, who said incredulously, “Are you kidding? Why do you think I was a lifeguard?”
At least he was more appreciative than the unforgiving fluorescents of the fitting room. One glimpse at the three-way mirror under the ghastly glare, and you recognize pores you haven’t seen since senior prom, wrinkles you’re paying Estée Lauder to hide. Speaking personally, my skin is fish-belly white. And belly fat from three directions is at least two too many. Wait. That’s back fat. Most women I know would rather expose themselves to the media and run for president than bare their bodies in Bloomingdale’s. One who has done both understands the gravity of the problem. In an environmental speech to high-tech executives during her 2007 campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged that replacing incandescent light bulbs with more energy-efficient CFRs was stalled by the bulbs’ sickly shade of green. “Every woman in this audience knows what it is like to try on a bathing suit in a dressing room with a fluorescent light,” said the then senator, instantly earning the vote of fashion victims nationwide. “There will not be broad-based market acceptance until we get a better glow!” For columnist Ellen Goodman, the solution is simple: replace the fluorescents (in the dressing rooms, not eco-friendly American homes) with candles, and mandate only one long skinny mirror. And we all live happily ever after in the land of size 2.
Until then, there is spandex. Pull it out—it snaps back; tug it over your bulges—it mashes them flat. Spandex is an anagram for “expands,” which it does, then recoils to make sure you don’t. It does for swimmers what months of sit-ups have not. “We were the first to use it,” recalls Miriam Ruzow, who designed the ultrachic suits for her family-run Gottex brand, which compacted the bodies of bathers from Elizabeth Taylor to Princess Di. “The bigger amounts we used, the more it controlled,” she says. “And the prints were like a camouflage. We knew what to highlight and what to cover up.”
Today’s spandex queen is Miraclesuit. “If she has a little bit of a tummy, it flattens it; a little bit of a rear, it lifts; if her bodice area is a little bit lacking or overzealous, it compensates.” Sandra Davidoff, director of corporate relations for Miraclesuit, is telling me about the phenomenally successful line of stylish swimwear that promises to make women “look 10 lbs. lighter in 10 seconds.” “It’s the best compression suit out there,” she says, denying any comparison to sausage casing. “Nothing pops out of any spot where it shouldn’t be. It just sucks you in and keeps you in.” Miraclesuit’s secret is a triple dose of nylon Lycra (brand name for spandex) for “triple the holding power,” Davidoff explains. “A yard of fabric that’s protecting our bodies against the world.” I think about the heavy, boned girdles of another era, which condensed my mother the way Reader’s Digestcondensed books. Only the fibers have changed. “Most women have body issues,” Davidoff says. “Nobody thinks she’s good enough to strut her stuff. You want to be able to walk to the beach or the pool and feel confident that everything stays where it belongs, that nothing is jiggling.”
The market is confirmed by Miraclesuit’s consumers. The largest size in the line, which used to be 18, is now 24W—a sign of the corpulent times in which we are living, Davidoff explains. Even Speedo, the least you can wear for fast, efficient swimming, has seen its most popular size grow from a 10 to a 14. “But there’s another side to it,” explains Kate Wilton, Speedo’s director of performance. “People who aren’t as fit still want to get into the water and exercise.” And there are suits for them.
Speedo, which helped lead the revolution from wool to nylon to Lycra, now uses its own version of “extra-life Lycra” to “inspire aquatic confidence,” Wilton says. “We want swimmers of all levels to get into the water. We want to make swimming a sport for everyone.” Its signature model is the shoulder-baring Ultraback, an X-shaped backstrap that “doesn’t move around when you swim laps. You don’t want your straps to slip off.” Ultrabacks frame the bulging lats propelling swimmers down pool lanes across America. What you see when they turn over is less inspiring. Call it the uni-bosom. “Yes, it’s just smooshing everything down,” Wilton agrees. “We’ve found that it’s easier to swim through the water if you’re more compressed, almost like a sports bra with running. Not the most flattering thing to wear, but it helps you exercise more efficiently. Our suits are for performance.”
At Aqualab in England, Speedo’s top-secret research and development facility, scientists investigate how the anti-drag properties in everything from jet planes to Formula One cars can be applied to speed suits, using high-speed underwater video to observe how water moves over a swimmer’s body. The current gold standard, worn by top racers, is a lightweight, woven (the others are knit) fabric that feels like paper and conforms to the body, if you can imagine, even more like a second skin than your basic Ultraback. “Don’t try it on,” Wilton warns me about the wispy sample she lets me fondle. “It would take you a really long time to get into it. They are so tight and so compressive, the first time someone puts one on usually takes up to twenty minutes. It’s a lot of work.” Surprisingly, even the superbly toned torsos on Olympians need some help. Wilton says tiny waists are a hindrance because “when you dive in, water would get stuck in your waist and slow you down when it hit the hips. So we try to compress the body front to back to make a flat surface, filling in the waist so it’s the same width as the hips. That way, water flows over the body as quickly as possible.” And up front? “Yes, it drastically reduces the size of the chest. We’re trying to make as few bumps and grooves in the body as possible.”
But Speedo and other manufacturers had their own bumpy ride with aerodynamically accurate creations that may have rocketed athletes right to the wall. It’s now called the Suit Era—the years from 2000 to 2009, when polyurethane body clingers that looked like high-tech versions of what my grandfather wore in winter helped swimmers smash some two hundred records in more-than-record time. Fans loved the speed, the excitement of seeing hundredths of seconds shaved off by a skin. Critics charged that the suits, for both men and women, were performance-enhancing, adding buoyancy and improving the flight to the finish line. In 2009 FINA, the sport’s official organizing body, outlawed them, banning polyurethane from the pool and setting up new rules. Official competitive swimmers must now wear suits that are woven, knitted, or braided from fabric—that is, no more of those better-living-through-chemistry costumes. We have entered the Textile Era (yes, it’s really called that), with rules that specify how much of the body can be covered (knees to waist for males, knees to shoulders for females), how thick the fabric must be (to prevent buoyancy that would aid flotation), and that it must have no zippers or—ready for this?—scales. No fish need apply.
Speedo’s solution for 2012 is a compression suit with zones of a newly patented Lycra, compacting buttocks, chest, and legs for women; just the bottom half for men. It’s part of a first-ever completely coordinated racing ensemble—cap (molded more like a human head than a moon), goggles (double-sealed, cat’s eye sleek), and suit—called the Fastskin3, engineered, according to Aqualab’s Dr. Tom Waller, so that water flows unobstructed over the racer’s body. “The cap hands the flow off to the goggles so that there’s no point where water can escape,” he says, all the way down the body. “Water follows from the tips of the fingers to the tips of the toes.” The result: a 5.2 percent reduction in active drag, claims Dr. Waller. At the rollout for the new suits, Speedo USA president Jim Gerson eyes the Olympians modeling the outfits and says, with approval, “How scary they all look!” Freestyle champion Ryan Lochte adds this threat to the competition in London: “When I put it on I feel like a super hero, an action figure, ready to take on the world!”
That racers prefer the modified long-john look in an industry previously sprinting toward minimalism is ironic indeed. The narrative of modern swimwear is the story of less—from bloomers to bikinis for women, from baggy trousers to banana hammocks (ask a kid) for men. But the battle to liberate human flesh from the confines of Victorian prudery was frustrating. Female bathers had to wear fabrics and styles more suitable for church: gray flannel trousers and sleeves to the wrist; full skirts topped by sailor blouses and puffy sleeves made of black serge or mohair.
The prim “fashion for concealment,” wrote one observer of the “much-clothing craze” in 1905, was not healthy. “Especially in the United States, no monstrous disfigurement that can by any means be flaunted on land seems too grotesque for women in the water. Hats, shoes, even stockings, are worn at those mixed picnics for what some call bathing. . . . We shall next be told to put on clothes before getting into our baths at home, for fear of seeing our own bodies.”
What Europeans, especially the French and British, did with their bodies at the seashore gives new meaning to the idea of taking a dip. In fact, they were dipped—a technical term—by “dippers,” from a “bathing machine,” an enclosed cubicle on wheels that carried you directly from the beach to the waves. Inside the horse-drawn chamber, a proper lady could replace her city garb with equally cumbersome bathing attire in complete if Spartan privacy; a canvas awning extended from the roof and snaked down to the water so she could slide into the sea unobserved. This sanctuary from disgrace was frequently accompanied by sturdy attendants (the dippers), who dunked the aquatically challenged into the brine for minutes of soothing surf. Jane Austen famously enjoyed one; so did the royal family. Men used them too, but they got to swim naked.
Bathing machines were so much more popular overseas than in the United States that when Russian diva Ida Rubenstein was invited to perform at New York’s Palace Theatre in 1915, she demanded “my own little house on wheels that I may be drawn into the water where one may bathe discreetly but becomingly.” Madame Rubenstein was particularly concerned lest American “prudery forbids me the one-piece bathing suit” she’d been freely wearing on the French coast.
The Bathing Machine
Imagine to yourself a small, snug, wooden chamber, fixed upon a wheel-carriage, having a door at each end, and, on each side, a little window above, a bench below. The bather, ascending into this apartment by wooden steps, shuts himself in, and begins to undress, while the attendant yokes a horse to the end next the sea, and draws the carriage forwards, till the surface of the water is on a level with the floor of the dressing-room, then he moves and fixes the horse to the other end. The person within, being stripped, opens the door to the sea-ward, where he finds the guide ready, and plunges headlong into the water. After having bathed, he reascends into the apartment, by the steps which had been shifted for that purpose, and puts on his clothes at his leisure, while the carriage is drawn back again upon the dry land; so that he has nothing further to do, but to open the door, and come down as he went up. Should he be so weak or ill as to require a servant to put off and on his clothes, there is room enough in the apartment for half-a-dozen people. The guides who attend the ladies in the water are of their own sex, and they and the female bathers have a dress of flannel for the sea; nay, they are provided with other conveniences for the support of decorum. A certain number of the machines are fitted with tilts, that project from the seaward ends of them, so as to screen the bathers from the view of all persons whatsoever. . . . The machines can be used only at a certain time of the tide, which varies every day; so that sometimes the bathers are obliged to rise very early in the morning. For my part, I love swimming as an exercise, and can enjoy it at all times of the tide, without the formality of an apparatus.
—Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 1771
Enter Annette Kellerman. The Australian champion had been swimming for years in a unitard of her own making—sleeveless, scoop-neck, body-hugging, like a boy’s racing suit—either with or without full leg stockings. It had served her well in the Yarra, Seine, and Thames, even while entertaining the queen of England. Now in America, where she’d been invited to add her mermaid act to a number of amusement parks and vaudeville shows, she took one look at the beaches and gasped, “How could these women swim with shoes—stockings—bloomers—skirts—overdresses with puffed sleeves—sailor collars—in some cases even tightly fitted corsets? But then nobody really went swimming. Everybody waded in and out and then just bobbed up and down.”
The popular story, based entirely on her own account, is that she showed up at Revere Beach near Boston in 1908 and decided to go for a swim. Her bare legs immediately got the attention of a policeman, who took her to court. Her often-repeated defense (“I can’t swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline”) swayed the judge, who released her to swim a three-mile exercise run in Boston harbor. While the story doesn’t show up in any newspaper accounts or court documents, the result is legitimate swimming history: Annette Kellerman changed forever the way women thought about dressing for and dealing with the water. That part can be easily tracked in America’s dailies. The newspapers loved it—any photo of a woman in a bathing suit was the kind of legal voyeurism that safely made the front page. Still does.
Kellerman says she appeased the law by agreeing to be wrapped in a robe when she was not swimming or performing. She also added tights to her knees, then tied a flimsy swatch of fabric around her waist to give the illusion she was fully dressed. Kellerman was very good at illusion. She went on to a stupendous career in vaudeville, then Hollywood, and was even named “The Perfect Woman” by a Harvard professor who decided her measurements most closely resembled those of the Venus de Milo. Her act was occasionally scandalous, often cheeky (“What we are selling here is backsides,” explained the showman who added multiple mirrors to her swimming tank, “and a hundred backsides are better than one!”), but it showed women what they, too, could do.
And in an era when the police prowled the beaches with tape measures to make sure not an inch of extra epidermis was exposed, her suit started a revolution.
In time, hemlines receded, liberating limbs, necks, and navels to the sun. Taboos were lifted, new lightweight fabrics were invented, and eight yards of heavy wool that shrouded women’s curves shriveled to a single swath of body-hugging, synthetic smoothness that flaunted them. As sportswriter Paul Gallico wrote of Annette Kellerman’s breakthrough swimsuit, “It made the question of how ladies were put together no longer a matter of vague speculation.”
For a time, suits were gender-neutral, sporty little tank tops attached to thigh-high shorts that looked exactly like the outfits worn by men. I know because I have a yellowing photo of two spiffy dress-alikes on a New Jersey beach: my mother and father, looking dashing in those very suits.
By the late 1930s, men were allowed to dump the undershirts. And Hollywood culture steered women’s suits toward less coverage, more cleavage. Betty Grable took American GIs to war with a come-hither look that forever ended the question of whether a bathing suit could be sexy from the rear. And while the end of World War II meant the end of rationing fabric, designers were in no mood to amplify. They preferred less coverage, more cleavage. And whatever else they could get away with. In 1946, just after the United States had exploded test nuclear weapons on the Pacific atoll called Bikini, Swiss engineer Louis Reard and French couturier Jacques Heim separately sewed up tiny little patches for strategic parts of the female body. There was not a lot of sewing. Someone named the skimpy new suit the bikini—perhaps because of its explosive effect on the planet. When Brigitte Bardot put it on (and took it off) in the movies, nobody confused it with a Speedo. The inimitable Diana Vreeland, then at Harper’s Bazaar, dubbed the bikini the “swoonsuit,” calling it “the most important thing since the atom bomb.” She later quipped that it revealed “everything about a girl except her mother’s maiden name.” All that exposure took its toll on American women. In the 1960 song “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” the first-time wearer is so embarrassed, she hides in the locker room, then in a towel, then in the water to avoid being seen. The song, however, soared to the top of the pop charts, a sure sign that the suit was here to stay.
Another generation of designs with more descriptive names soon followed: the thong, the topless, an industry of-inis. Manufacturers added stiff “bones” for structure, ruffles for fun. In time they even eliminated the modesty panel—the little strip of fabric that covered the crotch so that, well, the crotch would be covered. But the relaxation of morals also stripped away the same attitudes that had kept so many women out of the water.
In 1917 a courtroom stenographer named Charlotte Epstein, who enjoyed swimming after work, founded the Women’s Swimming Association in New York, the first such club organized in America to train champion swimmers. Epstein then convinced the Amateur Athletic Union to allow women to compete: another first. And to make them faster—which meant losing the leggings that had become de rigueur with the Kellerman suit—Epstein arranged for two of her stars, Ethelda Bleibtrey and Charlotte Boyle, to show up at a Brooklyn beach without stockings. They were, as planned, arrested for “nude swimming,” but the publicity and public outcry decided the case. The girls were released from jail and from wearing stockings forever more. Epstein was ingenious. In those years before women got the right to vote, she also arranged suffrage swims to raise money for the cause. And in 1920 she helped negotiate the participation of America’s first female swimmers in the Olympic games—eight years after the USOC allowed them in. She also managed the team. Six years later, Epstein selected another of her stars to swim the English Channel. Her name was Gertrude Ederle. American women were in the water for good.
It was a far cry from the dainty image of earlier times. Theodore Roosevelt, one of our swimming presidents, once stripped down for a dip in the Potomac with a group of personal and governmental friends. Someone pointed out to the French ambassador that he hadn’t removed his gloves. “I think I will leave them on,” he responded ever so Gallically. “We might meet ladies!”
What you wear in the water depends on your needs, but everyone definitely needs goggles. Largely unknown until the 1970s—Olympians weren’t even allowed to wear them until 1976—they have revolutionized swimmers’ wardrobes the way seat belts have changed the way we ride in automobiles: you just don’t go in without them. Racers prefer tiny, hard plastic lenses strapped as close to the face as possible. Racers also suffer more silently than the rest of us. One former freestyler tells me she just lived with the pain when the tight pair that fit into her eye socket left a calcium deposit in her browline. Think migraine. I spent years seeking the perfect pair of goggles: Some leaked. Some made me feel penned in. They all hurt and left deep rings around my eyes. I thought I’d figured it out with a comfy brand that rested gently on foam, but they only fit erratically. I have finally found true goggle contentment with a slightly larger style from Aqua Sphere that allows me a more panoramic view and doesn’t leave me looking like a raccoon.
Sometimes a Suit Won’t Help
In the Seinfeld episode called “The Hamptons,” George is changing after a dip in the swimming pool when Jerry’s girlfriend accidentally walks into the room and sees him naked. Gasp! As her eyes slide south, she giggles and apologizes, not at all convincingly. Then bolts from the room, still chuckling. George inspects himself and screams in frustration. Women, it seems, don’t understand the science of shrinkage. It’s all about cold water.
When the frigid sea and a strong north wind thwarted Byron’s first attempt to cross the Hellespont, he wondered whether “Leander’s conjugal affection must not have been chilled in his passage to paradise.” And the Coney Island Polar Bears have been known to chant this before they hit the icy Atlantic: “Shrinkage comes and shrinkage goes; Monday morning no one knows.” They were not quoting Byron.
Fins are shorter than flippers and can be very useful to strengthen the legs. And then there is music, or whatever else you’d like to hear. Recently, in the interest of multitasking, I purchased a waterproof case for my smallest iPod and plugged into a series of audio books while lapping back and forth in the pool. The listening was fine—I chose mostly novels about ancient history, to keep me above the daily grind—but the earplugs never quite fit right, and the wires connected to the case on my upper arm shattered the illusion of myself-as-mermaid. I decided to abandon it until I run out of things to think about.
Speaking of which, I’ve solved the problem of keeping track of my laps—frustratingly elusive when you’re dreaming big dreams—with a nifty little finger ring called the SportCount Chrono 100. You thumb down a button when you hit the wall, and it tallies your lengths (and minutes) electronically. It is endlessly practical. “Some Buddhists and Hare Krishnas count their prayers with them,” says Bernard Fitzmorris, a practicing dentist from Washington, D.C., who invented the gadget when he kept forgetting what lap he was on. “We also get notes about women timing their contractions when they’re in labor. And there’s a bungee club that ordered a bunch to see how long each bounce lasts.”
But for all the new tools to make our inner swimmer more comfortable, no one has figured out hair. Chlorine strips its color and luster. Latex crushes the follicles and makes you look downright ugly. Is there no hope for swim caps? You’d think that a nation that got us to the moon, etc. You’d think they could actually make one that’s attractive. You would be wrong.
The problem is, caps are not designed to keep your hair dry. They’re about keeping hair out of the drains of pools and aboutkeeping you streamlined. For guys too. That they make us look like the pin-headed taste buds from the old TV commercials is just plain dumb. Surely there are better solutions.
Esther Williams made it look easy with a smile that never melted and hair that never wavered in the waves. But her arrangements are impractical. She wore special cream makeup topped with powder, set in a shower. Her hair was slathered with a concoction of warm baby oil and Vaseline “that looked suitable for lubricating cars,” then woven into braids, topped by artificial braids pinned up to stay put. By “the time I came out of hair and makeup,” she writes, “I was as waterproof as a mallard.”
For many African American women, hair has been the showstopper. “A lot of black people raised the way I was—in cities, which is most of us—don’t like the water,” says Josie, the swimming protagonist in Martha Southgate’s novel The Taste of Salt. The reasons: “hair, money, time, lack of opportunity.” Mostly hair. Josie solves the problem by cutting off her cornrows to “let my head be free. . . . I’m never growing it back.” Southgate did the same, but she’s unusual.
Tracy Roach was a competitive swimmer from fifth to ninth grades, a champion in butterfly and free at her school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “My parents were so proud when I won my medals,” she remembers. But when she moved up to high school, she quit. “You get into your fashion and your clothes. And I said, I can’t do that any more! So I stopped swimming and started playing volleyball.” What she meant was she couldn’t get her hair wet any more. Still doesn’t. Like many African American women, she stays out of the water because it wrecks the hair she’s so laboriously straightened. The process takes two to three hours, she says. And while her young son and daughter swim (“Curly is in now, so it’s not a problem for her”), she stays out. Why not go curly herself? “No! It’s too humid here,” she says, accurately describing the Laundromat climate of her home state. And if her kids want to go to the beach and she just got her hair done? “We won’t go.” I try again: Can’t you keep your head out of the water? “It won’t work, because then you start liking it and then you go under.”
For Tracy Roach, commission assistant in the City of Fort Lauderdale, swimming still tugs at her heart. “I love the water; I really do,” she says, reflecting. “It’s refreshing, relaxing. You’re at peace. If I could swim every day and not have to worry about my hair, that would be. . . .”
A really big moneymaker.
