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As often happens, the general consensus and social attitudes regarding various social taboos, faux pas, and all that constitutes acceptable behavior aren’t unlikely to be readily apparent in very unexpected places. For the past several decades, one such place has been the beach. Odd as it may sound that a sandy piece of real-estate where land meets a body of water provides the stage for all manner of social debates, it is nevertheless a fact that the beach is a place where social norms are regularly challenged and new trends heavily scrutinized.

Because the beach is a place where people typically go to swim or bask in the sun, the normal attire expected of the people there has always been more physically scant and more revealing than regular clothing, the degree of which differs drastically across different countries and periods in history. Debate over what kind of attire is acceptable has called into question many social issues such as sexuality, censorship, feminism, gender equality, and religious expression.

Fashion in swimwear has, generally speaking, been cyclical over the course of history. In ancient antiquity, swimming was done in the nude by both men and women. With the rise of Abrahamic religions across the western world, particularly the adoption of Christianity by the Roman empire, the core principle of modesty before God shared by these religions lead to the implementation of more modest swimwear, designed to obscure as much of the human form as possible. This is a tradition that only within the past few decades, some two thousand years later, has been widely and popularly challenged. However, in some parts of the world, namely the Middle East where Islam is the sole institution of church and government, supremely modest swimwear is mandatory, sometimes even under the pain of death.

For the rest of the free world however, the past hundred years has witnessed a steady trend of increasingly small and often sexualized swimwear, a movement that has progressed faster in some places than others. During the 18th and 19th centuries, swimwear – especially for women – typically covered almost the entire body. Women wore “swimming gowns” that covered virtually everything save hands, feet, and the head, and were made of materials that would not become transparent when wet and were designed so as not to rise up in the water. Men too wore swimsuits that covered the arms and legs, and indeed the primary purpose of swimwear in those days seemed not to provide attire suitable for swimming but rather for minimizing the exposed body during the activity – going so far as to implement “bathing machines” which allowed people to change into swimwear and enter the water without so much as being seen.

Over time, swimwear first became tighter and more adherent to the form, at least partially suggesting the mere presence of human anatomy by revealing the basic shapes underneath. Within a few years, swimsuits began to shrink as it became acceptable for the arms and legs to remain uncovered and in women the necklines were allowed to recede toward the breasts while men were soon going to the beach entirely bare-chested. In spite of the now antiquated style swimwear having originated in Europe, the movement toward smaller bathing suits advanced more rapidly there. While in America one-piece form-fitting bathing suits were just becoming increasingly acceptable between the 20s and 40s, Europe was ready to embrace the bikini, which was invented by Frenchman Louis Réard in 1946.

Named after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific where some of the first extensive atomic bomb testing occurred, the new swimsuit triggered explosions of similar magnitude across the fashion world. In spite of the conservative attitudes still prevalent among authorities, younger generations were ready to embrace the bikini, and within 15 years eventually triggered an entire sexual revolution that was core to the counter-culture movement of the 1960s. Today, bikinis are the most popular model of swimwear in the world.