‘The first thing to say is that I’m a terrible swimmer,” says Amber Butchart, curator of a new exhibition on swimming that opens at the Design Museum in London this week. Growing up, school swimming lessons were “horrible, traumatic” – the cold water, the humiliation, the scrutiny from teenage boys. But something shifted when she moved to Margate 10 years ago and discovered the joy of swimming in the resort’s huge tidal pool, which was built in the 1930s. “This sounds quite pretentious, but it’s this idea of becoming one with the horizon,” says Butchart. “It’s almost like an existential feeling of the vastness of the world and being physically a part of that when you’re immersed in water. It’s transformational.”
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style explores our enduring love affair with swimming, from Britain’s lido boom of the 1920s and 30s to the Mermaidcore trend which has been all over TikTok in recent years. Among the 200 exhibits are the first Olympic solo swimming gold medal won by a British woman, a selection of men’s Speedos from the 1980s and the iconic red swimsuit worn by Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Though the exhibition tells the story of swimming through the lens of design and fashion, Butchart was keen to avoid the kitschy stereotypes of “bathing beauties” that often accompany the theme, and to take a deeper dive into the politics of the swimming pool.
“Obviously it’s a show about design and architecture and fashion, but there are so many social histories, and also wider global histories, that I wanted to try to get in as well, because this idea of outdoor swimming, the sea as redemptive, this is not the case for everyone. There are many communities in Britain that aren’t taught to swim for various reasons. And I’m in Kent, where we have people crossing [the Channel] in small boats which is this enormous tragedy. The sea is not a sanctuary for everyone.”
Butchart first had the idea for the exhibition during the pandemic, when indoor pools were closed and her daily swims in the sea became a ritual to be cherished, something “life affirming”. Margate was one of the first British resorts to promote sea bathing as a health cure in the 1700s, so it seems fitting that this is where the story begins. The oldest item on display is a knitted municipal bathing costume that would have been rented to swimmers by the Margate Corporation (the logo is fetchingly stamped on the front) in the 1920s. “What swimwear does is it allows access to public space,” says Butchart. “You can’t go swimming in a public space if you don’t have a swimsuit. So it’s immediately getting into those questions of who has access and who is not given access.”
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Clockwise from top left: The iconic red swimsuit worn by Pamela Anderson in Baywatch; Rebirth swimwear designed for non-binary and gender non-conforming people; a 1920s Margate Corporation bathing costume; Olympic swimmer Alice Dearing wearing a Soul Cap swim cap. Photographs: Zuma Press/Alamy; Colectivo Multipolar; Luke Hayes/Design Museum; Soul Cap
Butchart, a fashion historian who began her career working in a vintage clothing store, says she has an abiding love for 1950s swimwear, but adds: “I was very aware that so many stories about swimwear in the past promoted particular types of bodies and excluded other types of bodies. So, I wanted to make this a much more expansive show.”
One of the items on display is the swimsuit worn by Alice Dearing at the Tokyo Olympics. Dearing was the first black woman to represent Team GB in an Olympic swimming event and co-founder of the Black Swimming Association. In 2022 she collaborated with Soul Cap, a company that creates swim caps for people with afro hair, locs and braids. The caps were banned from the Olympics in 2021 by the International Swimming Federation on the basis that they didn’t follow the “natural form of the head”. The decision was reversed the following year.
As well as examining the social and cultural history of swimming, the exhibition will showcase contemporary designers and architects who are coming up with solutions to improve access to swimming spaces, whether it be the UK’s first beach huts purpose-built for people with disabilities in Boscombe, or a range of swimwear for non-binary, trans and gender non-conforming people. There will also be a short film from Subversive Sirens, a Minnesota-based synchronised swimming team whose mission statement is “black liberation, equity in swimming, radical body acceptance and queer visibility”.
Not only does the exhibition look at what we wear in the water, but it also charts the rise of the seaside as a place for showing off the latest fashions – the pier and the promenade doubling up as an outdoor catwalk. “One of the things I love about living at the seaside is that people take more risks with what they’re wearing,” says Butchart. “The sartorial rules can be broken.” One of her favourite items on display is a pair of 1930s “beach pyjamas”. Pioneered by Coco Chanel, this trend flourished in fashionable French resorts such as Juan-les-Pins and Deauville, eventually making its way across the Channel. “It was the first time women were really allowed to wear trousers in public for the first time,” says Butchart.
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Women on the promenade at Thorpe Bay, Essex, wearing matching beach pyjamas. Photograph: JA Hampton/Getty Images
The rise of beachwear coincided with the golden age of lido building, with art deco wonders such as the Jubilee Pool in Penzance popping up in coastal locations around the UK. The magnificent pool – the largest surviving saltwater lido in the country – reopened in 2016 following an extensive community campaign. Many of our public baths and lidos have not been so fortunate.
The timeline of the exhibition plots the rise of overseas package holidays, the ensuing decline of many British seaside resorts, and the environmental issues facing open water swimmers today. And while the solutions to some problems belong firmly in the 21st century – the ongoing search for alternatives to fossil fuel-derived synthetics for manufacturing swimwear, for example – for others, we must look to the past. Butchart believes that the connection between the seaside and wellbeing that made resorts such as Margate, Brighton and Scarborough fashionable in the 1800s could prove to be their salvation. She points to an initiative in her adopted home town of Margate – a free community beach sauna in a recreated Victorian bathing machine – as a perfect example of a “full circle moment”.
From the golden age of lidos to sewage in our seas, kiss-me-quick to queer visibility, the scope of the exhibition is as expansive as those horizon views from the Margate tidal pool. Butchart hopes that visitors will find it thought-provoking. But most of all, she hopes it will inspire them: “If people leave the exhibition thinking ‘I just really want to go for a swim’, that would be lovely.”
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style is at the Design Museum from 28 March until 17 August
