The vintage resale website where I found this one said is was "a 1950s brief cut" bathing suit. I'm counting on Calorman to let us know is that is indeed correct. It looks right to me, though.
Note to Leroy D.: You will no doubt like this one, but just wait. It gets better further on.
It was the Edwardian period that ultimately gave us the man's two- and three-piece suit, variants of which have been recycled ever since. (Coco Chanel was largely responsible for women's clothes for the first three quarters of the last century - before trousers became ubiquitous - by doing away with the bodices and stays and petticoats and giving us the two-piece suit - her revolutionary and perennial twin-set and pearls.)
ReplyDeleteIt was the 1920s that defined men's sportswear. Shorts and singlets emerge, to remain constant until the one-piece leotard of today. The biggest change, however, was not sartorial but sociological - men and women, strictly segregated in Victorian times, started to play sports together and men performed in mixed company for the first time.
The Victorian/Edwardian bathing costume went the way of all flesh, and men started to wear a singlet - which gets briefer and smaller until it disappears - and a pair of square, or "box" cut shorts, cut horizontal at the top of the thigh and rising to the waist.
In the 1930s - in part to do with the rise of Fascism and Bolshevism, two political cults that had scant time for religiously encouraged modesty - the swimming brief was introduced, with high rise legs over the hip and a lower waist line, of which the Speedo is the ultimate iteration and from which the bikini emerges.
The excesses of both Fascism and Bolshevism - still surviving in the Cold War - caused a major reaction against progressivism in America, manifesting in a fundamentalist Christian religious revival. There was a small, discernible rise in Church attendance in Britain, but even here as on the continent of Europe, Communism and Socialism proved to be the most popularly endorsed social systems. Thus, in Britain, men's swimwear - outside bodybuilding which America dominated - was very much briefer.
America reverted to the 1920s box cut swimming brief, which was designed to hide, not enhance, the male physique and stifle the erotic.
Outside the bodybuilding world, which was equally as conservative, the above image is absolutely on the money for what was deemed socially acceptable for the man in the street. This consensus was to collapse in the early 1960s, reflecting the social revolution that was already underway as a reaction to this puritanism, and the pendulum would swing the other way.
Thanks, Julian. It all makes sense, but I've always wondered why those 50s suits were form fitting and not the looser boxer style. Seems like that would have shown even less.
DeleteThanks for rescuing that... I thought it had disappeared up Google's hoop.
DeleteIn respect of "form fitting", the above is not a very good example - but it was at the very least the goal. To answer your question, I think it was the medical obsession with groin injuries. An entire garment - the "jockey strap" - had been invented for such when the bicycle saw the light of day, and this soon spread to all sports. By the 1950s, it was the medical orthodoxy - and in those days, doctors ranked with priests and preachers, six foot above criticism (in their pulpits). It was at this period that the "swimmer" jock came on the market and men were encouraged to wear one even under their swimming trunks. (This didn't happen in Britain because the water was just too cold - you went in like Samson and came out like Delilah.) With the swimming brief becoming much smaller in the early 1960s, Bike redesigned the swimmer/jogger strap, reducing the waist band down to ¾". The swimming brief had to be big enough to wear a jockstrap beneath. Then, of course, swimwear manufacturers cottoned on and started to make their trunks with built-in support and linings. So I think it was a muddle-headed mixture of all the foregoing which is what happens when human beings emote rather than think. And no one emotes better than a religious fundamentalist.
No problem. Google in its infinite lack of wisdom has been making me manually clear what they consider lengthy and/or frequent comments again. Please don't cut back because your input is highly valued. And thanks for the clarity on the form fitting thing.
DeleteAnother reason for the high waist was the Hollywood influence. While not specifically listed on the "moral" Hays code. It was expected that men in swimsuit do not display body hair (see Tarzan!) and do not display the navel if possible.
ReplyDeleteSearch for the Cary Grant/Randolph Scott photos and you will see.
And you know, monkey see, monkey do, if all the Hollywood stars were using this kind of trunks people will copy the style.
On the contrary, during the Hays period, the male ballet dancers had no bulges! They were totally flat. See the movie "Kiss me Kate" and that was in the 50's, earlier no bulges at all.
Johnny Weissmuller's version of Tarzan is the perfect example of the "no navel" rule.
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