In this week’s blog, Costume Society News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the Design Museum’s current exhibition, Splash! A century of swimming and style.
Guest curated by Costume Society member and dress historian Amber Butchart, Splash explores our enduring love of water over the past 100 years: from Britain’s lido boom during the early 20th century, to the viral Mermaidcore trend of the 2020s. The exhibition shows over 200 objects, from around 50 lenders across Europe and explores swimming’s evolution in its social, cultural, technological and environmental contexts.
“I live in Margate, and I grew up in a seaside town, and as a fashion historian, understanding our relationship with water through design and clothing has always been at the heart of my work. So, it's a delight to bring this exhibition to the Design Museum. The history of swimwear and swimming is fascinating as it mirrors wider changes in society over the past century, whether that’s around issues of bodily autonomy and agency, or how we spend our leisure time,”
Amber Butchart, guest-curator of Splash! tells us that the exhibition came from a long strand of her work looking at the sea, the seaside and how that impacts what we wear.
“10 years ago I published Nautical Chic which looked at the way the sea has impacted our wardrobes through various maritime professions from sailors and officers to fishermen and pirates. During the pandemic I was really interested in how outdoor swimming became hugely popular again. Indoor pools were shut, everybody was thinking about health and wanting to reconnect with nature. That in turn linked into 18th century ideas about health and wellbeing that fed into the seaside first becoming fashionable as doctors prescribed sea bathing and coastal resorts developed. So it was at that time that I put together my ideas for the exhibition and pitched it to the Design Museum in 2022.”
The exhibition is organised thematically comprising three key sections reflecting the three locations in which we swim: the pool, the lido and in nature. The design of the exhibition is a bright and joyful orange and blue, and items cover the globe and all industries from sports performance and fashion to architecture. Innovation in materials and making, leisure and travel, sport and performance all are explored.
The exhibition starts with ‘the pool’ section when in the 1920s when swimwear began to be marketed for swimming rather than bathing. Swimsuits and bikinis from some of the most famous swimwear brands like Jantzen and Speedo are on show, by, showing the many changes to the style of swimwear that reflect technical developments and evolving attitudes and fashions across the decades.
“The exhibition looks at a century of swimming in style, so we look back at the 1920s, a pivotal decade as we see a move from bathing to swimming in terms of how swimwear is marketed, the rise of companies like Janssen and this idea of physical activity, sport, becoming really fashionable,” Butchart said.
There are plenty of historic costume highlights in the exhibition including one of the earliest surviving examples of a bikini, which is on loan from the BikiniART museum in Germany, the first international museum of swimwear and bathing culture. One of designer Louis Réard’s first bikini designs from 1951 that featured newsprint is on show. There is also a man’s striped woollen swimsuit from 1933, produced under the Bukta label, on loan from the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. There are 1930s woollen Jantzen Swimsuits, archive Pathé footage of swimwear designs and a two-piece Utility design adorned with sea creature motifs for World War II wartime rationing. A 1920s colourful drawstring beach towel creates a changing cape and of course there are a pair of vintage beach pyjamas.
“I had some ideas of really key pieces of swimwear design to include like a Cole of California scandal suit and luckily, I already owned one of those. I knew we really had to source a Monokini, the topless swimsuit by Rudi Gernreich. We used a lot of collections in coastal museums which was great. Southend Museum have a really huge collection of swimwear which is absolutely fantastic and we borrowed pieces from Worthing and Falmouth as well, so it was really great to be able to tap into those local coastal collections,” Butchart said of the selection and curation process.
Highlight items include Pamela Anderson’s iconic red bathing suit from Baywatch, which at its 1990’s peak drew an estimated 1.1 billion weekly viewers. "It's incredible to be showing Pamela Anderson's iconic Baywatch swimsuit, especially at this pivotal point when she has reclaimed her own image, and has designed and modelled her own swimwear,” Butchart said. The swimsuit is on loan from the BikiniART museum. As well as Anderson’s red swimsuit, other popular culture highlights include a pair of Tom Daley’s Speedos won while competing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics Games alongside a jumper he knitted.
High performance swimwear and advances in textile technology are explored with items such as the banned ‘technical doping’ LZR Racer swimsuit, as well as a display of ten Speedo briefs that show the evolution of this iconic men’s item from the 60s to current times.
“Some of the real social history items are favourites of mine. For example, there's a Margate Corporation rental swimsuit from the 1920s on loan from Southend. You would have been able to rent that for your holiday to Margate from Margate Corporation which predates the council. There would also have been private companies that offered rental swimwear as well. I think that's something that we've kind of largely forgotten so that's a really special piece for me in the show. I also love some of the swimmers' stories that we've been able to include as well in the initial section, the pool, and also in the final section, nature.
We have a pair of beach pyjamas from Worthing Museum, which is a story I love because I love 20s and 30s fashions anyway, but beach pyjamas particularly I love because it shows that what could be worn at the coast, at the seaside could break rules, could be much more extravagant and flamboyant than items worn in other contexts and in urban spaces. It's still not considered appropriate for women to be wearing trousers in public in really any other public spaces at that time, so I love that about beach pyjamas,” Butchard said.
The architecture of swimming such as lidos are explored, as well as the role of mermaids and folklore in swimming’s story. The role of body agency and the politics of swimming is a key theme throughout the exhibition which closes on examining who swimwear is designed by and for.
Exhibition designers ScottWhitbyStudio created a central plinth in each of the three sections that are scale models of swimming spaces, but interestingly these are made from Storm Board recycled waste plastic, that can be recycled into other boards at the end of the exhibition. The paper used for labels throughout is the biodegradable Alga Carta created from polluting algae in the Venice Lagoon and other marine environments.
“I have tried to swim in as many of the spots we mentioned as possible. The Jubilee Pool in Penzance is a really key story for us because we've used it to discuss the Lido revival and the golden age of Lido building in the 20s and 30s through to the regeneration of many of these spaces today. The architects behind this pool were the designers for the exhibition itself and I swam there a few years ago when I visited Cornwall which was absolutely amazing. I live in Margate so I swim in the sea here and a local coastal sauna which I've been to many, many times. I've swum in a lot of the pools too such as those along the coast of Sydney and in New South Wales pools in the show as well.
I should say I'm a really bad swimmer. I'm not a good swimmer but I love being in water. I think I am definitely more of a kind of bather in a Victorian sense than a very sporty swimmer, but I love being in water and I love being in natural bodies of water and the kind of feeling of exhilaration that it gives you”, Butchart said.
The exhibition runs until 17 August 2025.
