In his recent article about early beach fashions in Malta, Giovanni Bonello has raised a fascinating question: Why are there no Maltese pre-war postcards showing swimmers or sunbathers on beaches?
They feature in a different genre – family photographs – as early as the 1930s. They show picnics of friends in mixed company, both genders sporting sunglasses and casually held cigarettes. Another shows a woman, with a flapper’s slim silhouette, posing in a bathing costume that might seem to cover too much for our tastes. But it was, in fact, a daring functional improvement over the baggy dress, worn over “Persian trousers”, that was still commonplace a generation earlier.
The only early 20th-century postcard that Bonello has found showing swimmers in beachwear is an admonitory one. It displays fully clothed paddling boys in the foreground, with a naked boy being nabbed by the police in the background.
The absence of postcards, until several decades into the last century, is not a uniquely Maltese phenomenon. It’s a European and North American one. How come?
It isn’t a simple case of a gradual erosion of prudery and growing enlightenment about the naturalness of the nude or semi-nude body.
Nudity preceded the prudery. Nudity was frequent among early 19th-century peasants, both men and women. Lingering on the beaches, though, was not an established practice. Peasants had much work awaiting them and, in any case, the sun was associated with work not play.
Men from the city also enjoyed swimming in the nude. However, until circa the middle of the 19th century, swimming (like most sports) was not seen as a feminine activity. When middle-class women began to swim in the US, beaches would sport red flags if naked men were still swimming. A white flag would signal the all-clear.
Women would then descend into the sea in floppy dresses, accompanied by a (clothed) man they knew. Sometimes, the bathing suits were simply old clothes.
Prudery at the beach therefore has a surprising modern origin: the practice of men and women swimming together as a leisure activity. With that came a new way of looking at the beach: a stage in which the self is displayed.
Several radical social and cultural changes had to take place for the beach to be experienced this way.
One was political. After WWI, the aristocrats who had previously dominated the famous seaside resorts and lidos became scarcer. With the loss of empires and thrones came relative penury. The closed world of the nobility was replaced by the open world of celebrities, who thrive on publicity: artists, novelists, film stars and designers.
The discreet manners of the titled were replaced by the bohemianism of the entitled, posing for the growing industry of glamour photography. When beach and poolside postcards became a genre, they were emulating the photos of the glossies, promising a lifestyle for the masses that had been associated with the stars.
The beachwear of the celebrities became skimpier over time but, once more, in surprising ways. In 1922, at the Venice lido, Coco Chanel wore wide Persian pyjama pants exposing tanned legs. But she continued to wear gloves, protecting her hands from the sun.
A tan is a mark of having the money and the leisure to afford a holiday, without having it cancelled by the boss
Up until the end of the decade, the fashionable flappers would continue to tan their legs while embracing a white face as an ideal.
Chanel and friends weren’t half-prudes. On the contrary, the Persian pants were daring because women did not usually wear slacks. The tanned legs were prominently displayed in the new dancing routines.
As for Chanel’s new design for beachwear – which was knitted and makes us hot just to think of it – that was a piece of daredevilry: knits were previously associated with undergarments.
Why were legs and arms deemed more acceptable for tanning than faces and hands? That’s a strange order of things only if we’re bamboozling ourselves into thinking the only thing that mattered was prudery. But social status mattered too.
Hands and faces were protected from the sun because it was absolutely important that no one misunderstood: the tan was the result of leisure, not peasant work or outdoor labour.
Pale skin was a status symbol for women. It denoted that they were affluent enough to stay at home. For men, who had their outdoor sports, a tan was different. It denoted rugged masculinity.
By the 1930s, a certain set of affluent women were engaging in male pursuits more openly. But it had to be done with an air of nonchalance. Cigarette-smoking and wearing sunglasses (previously military and motoring apparel) spread among women during the same period that the tan was becoming fashionable.
The difference between then and now can be seen in how we speak of getting a tan. Back then, a tan was something you affected you didn’t care you had. It was a sign of effortless elegance, the nonchalance of not caring you had darkened skin. (As with all affectations of effortlessness, of course, a lot of one’s time went into it.)
What a contrast with us, who openly speak of “working” on a tan. We admit the effort because everyone knows we work for long hours in artificial light. A tan is a mark of having the money and the leisure to afford a holiday, without having it cancelled by the boss.
And that’s why the beach and lido postcards become ubiquitous only after the war. It required affordable transportation, paid vacations and a mass of working people aspiring to share the world of the gods for a week.
Blake wrote there’s a world in a grain of sand. Yes, and there’s a snapshot of world history – of revolutions in politics, economy, technology and cultural imagination – in every postcard depicting beaches of sand.