Bathing Suits in Retrospect

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22350, 22 February 1936, Page 32 (Supplement)

Bathing Suits in Retrospect

JT is rather startling to reflect that in the days of Queen Elizabeth the bathing costume was even more scanty than to-day, for it had not yet been properly introduced in England. At each of her palaces and country estates the Queen had open-air bathing pools in which mixed bathing was the rule. The first English bathing costume appeared during Cromwellian days. It was a thoroughly Puritanical affair, reminiscent of the pyjamas worn by those famous comedians, Laurel and Hardy; and was made from jute. The Restoration brought colour and beauty to the costume. Ladies added a skirt and shortened the knickers to knee-length. Fabrics were expensive and elaborately embroidered.

During early Georgian days feminine costumes became more simple and classic in design, but contained innumerable yards of finely woven fabric which would hardly simplify swimming. Bathing women were introduced who took every care of their charges, teaching

them tho rudiments of swimming and, in the case of women, seeing that their elaborately coiffured hair did not become wot! With the dawn of the nineteenth century, feminine costumes again became a mass of frills and furbelows, nnd during crinoline days fashion decreed that woman should enter thn water complete with crinolined bathing dress and knitted stockings. There was very little difference between woman in the sea at Brighton and walking the fashionable promenades in thg, same town. As fashions became more of a cult with the average woman, so they tended to alter more quickly, and during the quarter-contury preceding the war were modelled on the style of dresses that were tho prevailing mode.