by “The first thing to say is that I am a terrible swimmer,” says Amber Butchart, curator of a new exhibition for swimming that opens this week in the Design Museum in London. The school swimming lessons was “terrible, traumatic” – the cold water, the humiliation, the testing of boys in teen age, but something that set off 10 years ago when she set off 10 years ago was the joy that discovered the joy of the travel and joy. was built in the 1930s. It is transforming. “
Spray! A century of swimming and style examines our permanent love relationship with swimming, from the British Lido boom of the 1920s and 30s to the Mermaidcore trend, which has been in Tikok in recent years. The 200 exhibits include the first Olympic Solo swimming gold medal, which was won by a British woman, a selection of men’s speeds from the 1980s and the legendary red swimsuit of Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Although the exhibition tells the history of swimming through the lens of design and fashion, Butchart was interested in avoiding the kitschy stereotypes of “bathing spells”, which often go hand in hand with the topic and immerse themselves in the politics of the swimming pool.
“Obviously It’s A Show About Design and Architecture and Fashion, but there are so many social history, and against Global Histories, that I want to try to get in as well, Becaus this idea of outdoor swimming, the Sea as redempive, this is not the case for every type. Britain that Aren’t Taight to Swim for Various Reasons. [the Channel] In small boats, which is this huge tragedy. The sea is not a sanctuary for everyone. “
Butchart first had the idea for the exhibition during the pandemic, when the interior pools were closed and their daily swimming in the sea became a ritual that was appreciated, some “confirmation of life”. Margate was one of the first British resort to promote the sea in the 17th century as a health hardening. So it seems fitting that the story begins here. The oldest article that was issued is a knitted urban bathing costume that would have been rented by Margate Corporation to swimmers in the 1920s (the logo is picked up). “What bathing clothes do is that it enables access to public space,” says Butchart. “You cannot swim in public space if you don’t have a swimsuit. Therefore, you will immediately go hand in hand with the questions, who has access and who does not receive any access.”
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Clockwise from top left: the legendary red swimsuit of Pamela Anderson in Baywatch; Bear-birth bathing clothing for non-binaries and gender-specific non-compliant people; A bathing costume of the 1920s Margate Corporation; Olympic swimmer Alice Dearing wears a soul cap. Photos: Zuma Press/Alamy; Colectitive -Multipolar; Luke Hayes/Design Museum; Soul cap
Butchart, a fashion historian who started her career in a vintage clothing business, says that she has a lasting love for bathing clothes from the 1950s, but adds: “I was very aware that so many stories about bathing clothing in the past advertised certain species of bodies and excluded other types of bodies.
One of the items on display is Alice Dearing’s swimsuit at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Dearing was the first black woman to represent Team GB in an Olympic swimming events and co -founder of the Black Swimming Association. In 2022 she worked with Soul Cap, a company that creates swimming caps for people with Afro hair, locs and braids. In 2021, the caps were banned from the International Swimming Association by the Olympic Games that they did not follow the “natural form of the head”. The decision was reversed the following year.
The exhibition not only examines the social and cultural history of swimming, but also shows contemporary designers and architects that find solutions for improving access to swimming rooms, regardless of whether it is the first beach huts of the UK, which were built for people with disabilities in Boscombe or a selection of swimwear for non-older and gender-not-compliant people. There will also be a short film of subversive sirens, a synchronized swimming team in Minnesota, the model of which is “black liberation, equity in swimming, radical body acceptance and strange visibility”.
The exhibition not only sees what we wear in the water, but also the rise of the sea as a place to show the latest fashions – the pier and the promenade, which doubles as a catwalk outdoors. “One of the things I love by the sea is that people take more risks with what they wear,” says Butchart. “The sartorial rules can be broken.” One of her favorite items is a few of the 1930s “Beach Pyjamas”. This trend made by Coco Chanel flourished in fashionable French resorts such as Juan-les-Pins and Deauville and finally went over the canal. “It was the first time that women were allowed to wear pants in public for the first time,” says Butchart.
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Women on the promenade in Thorpe Bay, Essex, wear suitable beach pyjamas. Photo: yes Hampton/Getty Images
The rise of the beach clothes collapsed with the golden age of the Lido building, with Art -deco miracle like the anniversary pool in Penzance on coastal places in Great Britain. The magnificent pool – the largest surviving salted water lido in the country – was reopened in 2016 after an extensive community campaign. Many of our public baths and lidos did not have so happy.
The timeline of the exhibition draw the rise of the overseas packing holidays, the resulting decline in many British coastal resorts and the environmental problems for open water swimmers today. And while the solutions for some problems in the 21st century-the-day search for alternatives to fossil fuel-derived synthetics for the production of bathing clothing-we have to look in the past. Butchart believes that the connection between sea and well -being, the resorts such as Margate, Brighton and Scarborough in the 19th century, could prove to be their salvation. She refers to an initiative in her adoptive hometown Margate – a free municipal beach sauna in a reproduced Victorian bathroom – as a perfect example of a “full circular moment”.
From the golden age from lidos to wastewater in our seas, Kiss-Me-Quick to Queer Visibility, the scope of the exhibition is as extensive as this horizon view from the margate time pool. Butchart hopes that visitors will stimulate thought. But above all, she hopes that it will inspire her: “If people leave the exhibition, I think I really want to make swimming”, that would be nice. “
Spray! A century of swimming and style takes place from March 28th to August 17th in the Design Museum
