Beach and the Bikini

Louis Reard and the bikini

Wikipedia photo

I remember the two-piece swimsuits of my youth, hard to find and quite demure by today’s standards but shocking by early 20^th century modest attire.  When women dared for the first time to wear a one-piece bathing suit and later a two-piece swimsuit to the beach, it was quite radical and scandalous.

Historically, evidence has been found of bathing suit-style clothing in 5600 B.C. and at athletic events in Rome. The most famous and best-preserved evidence discovered consists of the mosaics in Villa Romana del Casale.

Quite fitting, the Villa Romana del Casale, an elaborate fourth century A.D. Roman villa, was found about 3 km from the town of Piazza Armerina, Sicily, a place bathed in sunshine, resplendent with beaches, and a balmy Mediterranean climate.

Photo: italianways.com

In modern times, women used two-piece bathing suits as early as the 1930s, but the infamous bikini did not appear on the beach scene until 1946, the creation of a Frenchman, Louis Reard, an automobile and clothing designer.

He dressed a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline, in a two-piece bathing suit on July 1946 and introduced her to the public at Piscine Molitor, a popular and fashionable public pool in Paris. It happened three weeks after atomic bomb tests were conducted by the United States on the Marshall Islands Pacific atoll named Bikini, so he decided to name his creation “the bikini.”

The amount of fabric used for such a piece of clothing varies today on the amount of covering it offers to the chest and to the bottom area. The most recent swimsuits are just G-strings, exposing plenty of the human anatomy. However, it is still modest by European nude beach rules.

Going to an American beach today is an interesting fashion show both in clothing choices or lack thereof and in artistic tattoos on various parts of the beach goer’s bodies.

Young and nubile women are sporting naked rears, their breasts spilling out of tiny strips and other unmentionables barely covered, stretching provocatively in the sand to the delight of ogling men who enjoy the narcissistic show. One can barely blame them as so much is on display and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

At the other extreme, women in full burkas with their kids and husbands in tow, sweating in black, covered from head to tow while their husbands are wearing comfortable American swim trunks. Perhaps there should be a middle ground between the skimpy bikinis and the burka tents.

Older men are wearing tiny Speedos, confident in their athleticism and manliness, with skin so tanned and dry that it looks positively mummified.

Seaside attire is not the only curiosity at the beach. Young women with verbal diarrhea use the English language in a way that would horrify anyone sitting in their hearing range – the F word or other choice vulgar expressions pepper their vocabulary every other word. Drinking like sailors regardless of age and smoking like chimneys on a cold day, completes the picture of our young American progenies at the beach.

So much societal degradation on display makes me sad. Perhaps I am too old to appreciate “progress,” and the new “feminism.”

Tattoos, Artistic Expression, Fashion Statement, or Self-Mutilation

Tattoos used to represent gang affiliation, prison time, or brotherhood in the military. Hollywood’s narcissistic behavior has changed that; imitation has become a misguided form of flattery.

Tattoos are a billion dollar industry. Considered now a form of self-expression, my body is my canvass, tats are not cheap. Tats are so desired that unemployed and partly-employed youth go into debt to pay for tattoos.

Tattoos and body piercings are considered a rite of passage in primitive cultures, and are more painful and more expensive to remove in western cultures. Some Christians object to tattooing because it defaces the perfect body that God has created.
On any given day, it is hard to scan any crowd without finding more and more people of all ages with visible and huge tattoos, body piercings, hooks, horns, chains, facial holes, gauged piercings, and other forms of body enhancement. There has been an explosion of young people covering their arms, their legs, their backs, necks, faces, and hands with colorful tattoos and body piercings in painful places.

A few tats are beautiful, masterfully done by skilled artists, some are ugly caricatures or stretched blotches of black ink, others picture words in foreign scripts the wearer does not understand, some represent kinship or brotherhood with an organization, a few make delicate or indelicate fashion statements, some are obscene, others represent prison time, the number of people murdered and gang affiliation, and others pay homage to a place, a person, a special date, a life-altering event, or a decision made while inebriated. No matter what the reason, tattoos become an indelible part of how that person is perceived for a lifetime regardless of their good, imperfect, or bad character.

Pirates had only one ear pierced because they believed it improved their visual acuity.

Holocaust victims at Auschwitz had numbers tattooed on their forearms by their jailers and torturers, a vivid expression of the utter brutality of Nazism and its attempt to dehumanize Jewish people.

When I first saw Otzi, the Iceman, the well-preserved mummy of a man who lived about 3300 B.C., in Bolzano, Italy, I focused on many details besides his belongings. Discovered in 1991 on the Austrian-Italian border between Bolzano and Innsbruck, Otzi had 57 tattoos. Scientists revealed that some tats were located near modern acupuncture points and they may have treated his degenerative arthritis. If that is indeed true, tattooing for medicinal purposes, a form of rudimentary acupuncture, occurred way before acupuncture was known to be in use in China around 1000 B.C.

“Otzi had several carbon tattoos including groups of short, parallel, vertical lines to both sides of the lumbar spine, a cruciform mark behind the right knee, and various marks around both ankles.” http://www.crystalinks.com/otzi.html

Two mummies, a man and his wife, from 2,500 years ago remained frozen in Pazyryk on the Altai steppes near the Mongolian border and western Siberia until it was found by Russian archeologist Sergei Rudenko in 1948. The man’s body was covered with tattoos, his arms, legs, and trunk – “monsters with wings and cats’ tails, lion-griffins with snakelike bodies, deer with huge antlers and eagles’ beaks.”

The Scyths (Scythians), Iranian equestrian tribes, who lived in central Asia from 7th to 3rd century B.C., were famous for their tattoos. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) wrote, “the whole mass of the Scyths, as many as are nomads, cauterize their shoulders, arms, and hands, chests, thighs, and loins, for no other purpose than to avoid weakness and flabbiness and to become energetic.”

Tattooing then was a painful status symbol for Scythians. Skilled tattooists punctured deeply into the flesh of their customers elaborate designs of real and imaginary creatures and then “filled the holes with a black liquid.”

Another Pazyryk people discovery was made in 1993 in Novosibirsk, a 25 year old blond princess preserved in the Siberian permafrost. The Ukok Princess had perfectly preserved 2,500 year old tattoos on both arms. Dr. Polosmak postulated that tattoos were a means of personal identification, status and position in society, as well as the ability for the people of the same clan to find each other in the afterlife. “The more tattoos were on the body, the longer it meant the person lived, and the higher was his position.”

Other bodies found in 1929 in the Siberian permafrost, such as that of a man, exhibit animal tattoos from head to toe:  mountain sheep called argali, griffons with vulture beaks, winged snow leopards, and fish.

(Photo: The Siberian Times reporter, August 14, 2012)

 

 

This is the photograph reconstructing a warrior’s tattoos, warrior found on the same plateau as the Ukok Princess. The drawing of tattoos was made by Elena Shumakova of the Institute of Archeologyand Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science.

The princess’ tattoos were highly intricate and artistic, representing mythological animals and fantastical creatures: “a deer with a griffon’s beak and a Capricorn’s antlers. The antlers are decorated with the heads of griffons. And the same griffon’s head is shown on the back of the animal. The mouth of a spotted panther with a long tail is seen at the legs of the sheep. She also has a deer’s head on her wrist, with big antlers. There is a drawing on the animal’s body on the thumb on her left hand.” http://siberiantimes.com/culture/others/features/siberian-princess-reveals-her-2500-year-old-tattoos/

Tattoos are as old as our civilization and, for whatever complicated reasons humans seek and get tattoos today, they appear to be an outer expression of the inner self screaming to be noticed.