TOP TO BOTTOM: Chanel’s boucle knit is modest. A vintage Adolfo turban adds more cover -- and style.
Women of the world rejoice: This is not the season of the skimpy swimsuit.
Michael Kors put full-cut bikinis on the runway two years ago, and Abaete designer Laura Poretzky has been making pinup-style suits since 2004. But the retro swimwear trend really took off with the spring collections, when Stella McCartney showed a playful blue-and-green two-piece with bloomers on the bottom, and Karl Lagerfeld channeled Brigitte Bardot with a boucle knit bandeau and briefs at Chanel. Miuccia Prada made the most convincing case for poolside modesty when she paired jewel-tone satin tunics and turbans straight out of "Sunset Boulevard.
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More than anyone else, Prada broke from the kind of ornamentation that had been driving fashion. Above all, she exulted the female form, putting the spotlight on the most innocent of feminine assets, a great pair of gams.
And as unimaginable as it might have seemed, our bare-it-all pop culture is catching on to the coverup trend.
Scarlett Johansson played the 1940s starlet in the April issue of Vogue, baring very little as she posed in Dolce Gabbana and Prada at the pool and the beach. Another curvy girl, Beyonce Knowles, posed for the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue in a yellow-and-orange bikini of her own design with an ample boy-cut brief.
This move toward covering up could be a reaction to too many years of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
But it's also about a renewed interest in getting dressed, even for the pool. It's about returning the mystery to fashion by not letting it all hang out.
Wearing today's retro-inspired styles with ruching around the middle, low-cut legs and sweetheart necklines requires the confidence to appear as if one might have something to hide -- a flabby midriff, rounded thighs or breasts not augmented by implants.
Add a turban and you're really challenging the notion of what's conventionally sexy, with headgear rarely seen on anyone younger than 70.
But where bathing suits are concerned, today's safe was yesterday's scandalous. Soon after Aussie marathon swimmer Annette Kellerman arrived on U.
S. shores in 1907, she was arrested for trotting out a bare-legged bathing costume at Revere Beach near Boston. (At the time, women were still splashing around in pantaloons and sailor dresses.
) After she famously said in court, "I want to swim. And I can't swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothes line," the charges were dropped.
It was Kellerman who turned the overburdened, puritanical exercise of bathing into the body-conscious act of swimming.
By 1913, Jantzen was manufacturing one-pieces under the slogan "the suit that changed bathing into swimming," and swimwear officially had become fashionable.
Esther Williams, the 100-meter Olympic finalist, continued to romanticize swimming with a string of popular films during the 1940s and '50s, endorsement deals with swimwear company Cole and eventually her own swimwear label.
Pinup photography, as tame as it seems now, did help bring bareness to the mainstream, making it acceptable, even desirable for women to expose more of their bodies in public.
With the postwar economic boom, they had ever more opportunities -- swimming pools sprang up in parks and motels, and they became jewels in the suburban lifestyle. Everyone learned how to swim, both men and women.
Glamour girl swimwear lost its allure as bikinis became smaller and smaller.
But this summer we've come full circle. Fashion is telling us to hark back to a simpler time, when a pair of oversized sunglasses, a shapely swimsuit and a heady self-possession could make illusion the reality.
Now that we've seen nearly everyone in Hollywood naked, there's something to be said for covering up.
