Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy
Associated Press/Alamy
John Capstack/Showtown Blackpool
Showtown Blackpool
Header image: Subversive Sirens, photographed by Ackerman & Gruber. Above, from top: Pamela Anderson as C. J. Parker in Baywatch. The controversial LZR Racer. Lucy Morton in her GB Olympic swimsuit. Lucy Morton’s gold medal from the 1924 Paris Olympics.
Tickets have gone on sale for the Design Museum’s spring exhibition, Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style, featuring everything from Pamela Anderson’s red Baywatch swimsuit, the first Olympic solo swimming gold medal won by a British woman, Lucy Morton, one of the earliest bikinis by their inventor, Louis Réard, featuring his original newsprint design, and 10 men’s Speedos dating from the 1980s to today. The exhibition is guest-curated by dress and design historian Amber Butchart, known for her history segments on BBC One’s The Great British Sewing Bee, and on the Design Museum side, curated by Tiya Dahyabhai.
Over 200 objects appear in thre in-depth sections from c. 50 lenders across Europe, tracing the evolution of swimming in its social, cultural, technological and environmental contexts, says the Museum.
The pool, the lido and nature are the three sections examining design’s role in shaping our relationship with swimming.
It begins with the 1920s, when modern swimwear emerged for swimming, rather than costumes for bathing, and takes the story to today where swimming influences our ideas of body autonomy and agency.
Other items in the exhibition include the banned LZR Racer swimsuit from 2008 which gave its wearers advantages in speed, buoyancy and drag reduction, an architectural model of the Zaha Hadid-designed London 2012 Aquatics’ Centre, a striped Butka men’s woollen swimsuit from 1933, a 1930s woollen Jantzen swimsuit with a Y-shaped back designed to aid speed, and a 1960s Bri-Nylon swimsuit designed for Olympic champion swimmer Judy Grinham.
The Baywatch swimsuit is one of the survivors from Anderson’s 1992–7 stint on the series, formerly owned by star David Hasselhoff and All-American Television, and on loan from the Bikini Art Museum in Germany.
The Réard bikini dates from 1951 though it is based on his original 1946 design.
There is a film about the regeneration of the Jubilee Pool in Penzance that opened in 1935, and examples of saunas, beach huts and public baths; stills of Glynis Johns as a mermaid in Miranda (1948), and of Halle Bailey on the cover of The Face promoting her role as Ariel in The Little Mermaid (2023). The exhibition also looks at who swimwear is designed by and for, and contemporary designers who enhance bodily autonomy and agency.
Tickets are available here.
Colectivo Multipolar; copyright © Sky Cubacub
© Alexandra Utzmann
Courtesy of Anthony Barboza
© ABIR Architects; photo courtesy of Richard Rowland (deceased)
Above, from top: Swimsuits by Rebirth Garments, modelled by Sky Cubacub and Nina Litoff. A Facekini. Photo #7, Willie and Toukie Smith, designer and model, NYC 1978. The Seagull and the Windbreak.
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