…A Scandalous One-Piece

Jantzen Bathing Suit. ca. 1925

Several weeks ago this bathing suit was taken off exhibit and cleaned in preparation for MOHAI’s big move. This Jantzen suit is from c. 1925 and was sold at Frederick & Nelson in Seattle.  It is a fantastic example of flapper fashion.

Wait, flapper fashion? Swimwear isn’t usually the first thing you associate with flappers. Instead, I bet you conjure up a woman in a short beaded or fringed dress, a string of pearls, and a pair of fishnets. I bet at least one person reading this has dressed as one for Halloween.

And you probably looked something like this in it.

In graduate school, I took a class where we researched and presented papers about fashion myths. We each investigated some fact or subject in fashion history that had been generally accepted as truth, but deserves further investigation. My classmate Larissa King researched flappers—who they were, what they wore, and what the term really meant at the time. Her paper was eye-opening, and I think I will forever be cautious about how I use the term.

To be a flapper was mostly about the attitude. A flapper was a young woman with a fun-loving, rebellious, and vivacious thirst for life. Dancing at a speakeasy in a beaded dress could be part of the flapper lifestyle, but at the time that wasn’t the only image that came to mind. In 1922 a magazine called The Flapper ran a contest to find the “Most typical flapper.” Most of the entrants submitted pictures of themselves in sportswear and bathing suits, and there was not a fringed dress in sight.

The Flapper, October 1922, p. 14-15

As it turns out, flappers were arguably more associated with one-piece bathing suits than evening dresses. Today we think of one-piece suits as conservative and two-piece suits as more revealing, but in the 1920s it was reversed. Wearing a one-piece knitted bathing suit (which clung to the body!) was quite shocking, and there were several beaches that banned them in the early 1920s. The alternative was to wear a multiple part “bathing costume” which consisted of an undergarment, a dress, and stockings.

Carl Henry Moen | Moen Collection | 1980.6880.307

In this image of swimmers at Ballard Beach (c. 1913) you can see a good example of a two-piece bathing costume (stockings included!) on the woman on the far right.

Webster & Stevens Collection | 1983.10.2122.3

This 1921 photos shows a model wearing a one-piece bathing suit from Saxony Knitting Company in Seattle. Definitely more flapper worthy!

Further reading: Larissa found a lot of great primary information about flappers by searching the New York Times historical database. You can discover some early uses of the word in the 1910s, what people said about flappers in the 20s, and what beaches were allowing or banning the one-piece. You can access it through the Seattle Public Library.