I'd hit it.
Posted on 08/01/2010 3:43:30 AM PDT by C19fan
From voluminous Victorian bathing-gowns to itsy-bitsy bikinis, one woman’s passion for beachside fashion has been turned into a fascinating new exhibition
It’s an English summer, suffused with the smell of chlorine, the aroma of suntans coaxed along with Ambre Solaire. It’s your great-grandmother, plunging into chilly waves from a bathing machine; your dad in his swimming trunks. It’s part of every family’s history – but how many of us hang on to old swimsuits? Step forward Mavis Plume, who has been collecting them for more than 50 years, from voluminous Victorian bathing-gowns to itsy-bitsy bikinis. Stashed away in boxes, they turned Mavis’s house in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, into a mermaid’s cave that nobody outside the family knew was there. Until last spring, that is, when she and her husband moved to Lincolnshire to be near their son David, who persuaded her that it was time for the 500 swimsuits to find a new home.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Be still, my heart!
A dark locked closet would have been a good choice.
Mavis is one homely woman.
Guilty
But the article says she’s 84! That ain’t no 84 year old woman modelling the swimsuits. If it is, more power to her.
I would agree with the verdict but it is her collection built up over 50 years so Guilty but probabtion due to extentuating (sp?) circumstances, hee hee.
I'd hit it.
I have many old family photos from the late 1890s through the last century. Many photos from the beach starting around 1916. One thing I had noticed is that the swim suits styles did not change all at once. There were always a mixture of old and new. One of the surprises for me was to discovering the woman (or usually teen girls) were wearing two piece suits as early as the the 1920s. Men were still wearing tops with their suits
Men fashioned appeared to change the most between the early 1920s and 1940s. Start out in two piece suits and by the time the war began they were in something that look like “speedos”. Very small, and very tight.
I found the article interesting.
I would imagine back in 1916 a lot of women did not have the disposable income to keep up with the latest fashion trends especially with a garment you might only wear once or twice a year.
Well that makes one of us.
Strange how she has what looks like bruises on her thigh in the last two photos (so they obviously aren’t) but they weren’t there before, wonder what those are?
Somehow I knew you’d be adding your two cents to this thread - LOL.
The advent of sunblock is under appreciated.
If you don’t want to get roasted and don’t have SPF-rated goop, you wear something long.
When you compare those suits to what people were wearing (particularly pre-1920) they really were “revealing”. Glad she saved those items of ephemera.
As for her looks, I won’t criticize her. Her enthusiasm for her collection (and what a great collection it appears to be!) shows through in every picture.
The difference between a swimsuit and underwear is the cut and print of the cloth and some kind of gentleman’s agreement.
Well in the case of my distance relatives they lived in Long Beach and spent most of their summer in and around the ocean. But for most, a swim suit was a sometime thing.
The styles then like now were driven by the young who always had a different priority then the adults.
Great quote, outstanding show. “Happy Christmas!” (For the informed :o)
Luckily, they were unable to find any 100 year old swimsuit models for this shoot.
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