IN THE SWIM

From the mid 1940s through the 1950s no one did more to promote bathing suits than Esther Williams. In her films for MGM starting with Bathing Beauty in 1944, Williams represented the technicolor lifestyle to a world coming out of the grays of World War II. Esther Williams was the perfect embodiment of better times - tall, athletic, cheerful, beautiful - and a champion swimmer. On her strong shoulders MGM developed a new genre of movie - the swimming spectacle, complete with choreographed scenes by Busby Berkeley and mixed with music and romance. The public's taste for viewing sun-drenched "exotic" locales, from Florida, Cuba, Mexico, and California to Hawaii was fed by the Williams movies. Demand for the new bathing suits grew exponentially. The California bathing suit makers led the market through the Jantzen, Cole of California, and Catalina companies.

Esther Williams not only starred in bathing suits, but promoted bathing suit labels and still has her own company. Not that she wasn't a great clothes model as well. With gown and suit designs by Irene and Helen Rose for her movies, she never failed to capture everyone's eye.

In the photo above Esther wears a gold lame bathing suit designed by Irene for the movie,

On an Island with You, 1948.

At the first TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, Esther Williams appeared with her co-star Betty Garrett for a pool-side screening of Neptune's Daughter on April 22nd. They were interviewed by Ben Mankiewicz for a charmed audience.

MGM never had anyone else like Esther Williams, but among their developing stars were other beauties who could add radiance to a beach. A young Ava Gardner was photographed above in a two-piece bathing suit in 1943, not long after she was signed on by MGM, and before any of her starring roles. Although two-piece bathing suits had already become common by the late 1930s, their design was still intended to cover up larger parts of the torso than their modern versions.

Model and starlet Jinx Falkenburg poses in this one-piece circa 1944. Jinx was born in Barcelona and raised in Chile. She starred in several movies for Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Columbia and had a long career in modelling and television.

Esther Williams' first movie was Bathing Beauty in 1944. Costume designer Irene Gibbons wanted Esther's bathing suit to sparkle just like the water. The bathing suit above is made of satin lastex in blush-pink on which is sewn a lozenge design composed of baguette rhinestones.

Cole of California made this bathing suit worn by Esther Williams in Skirts Ahoy! in 1952. It was made of needlepoint lastex. Typical of the Cole swimming suits of the period is the backless suit with a crossed shoulder-strap attachment to the sides.

Both single and two-piece bathing suits are shown in this photo in 1947. Georgia Lange of the Goldwyn Follies is on the left. The sheen of the black satin lastex fabric here mimics the sheen of lingerie.

Ava Gardner continued to be a photogenic model for bathing suits, this time in a polka-dotted two-piece photographed in 1944. Hollywood movies and movie stars were the leading promoters of the sunny life-style represented by wearing beautiful bathing suits and shot on the beaches of Southern California. Because of movie censors, however, the navel was not allowed to be seen on film. It would be in Europe that a more liberal climate led to turning the two-piece into the bikini, where it was seen both on the beach and on the screen. 

Getty Images

Brigitte Bardot wears a bikini on the beach at Cannes, France in 1953 during the Film Festival. Bardot had made a sensation in her first film the year before, Marina, la Fille Sans Voile, where she appeared in a bikini. The bikini itself had been designed in 1946 by French fashion designer Jacques Heim. He called his bikini the Atome, for its smallness. French engineer and lingerie shop owner Louis Reard "split the atom" by calling his even smaller bathing suit design the Bikini, in honor of the atoll where atom bombs were being tested. It was many more years before bikinis were seen in the U.S. They were slow to catch on in France too until Brigitte Bardot made them popular on the Riviera.

Although the movie studios tried to catch the waves with a variety of beach and surf movies in the 1960's, for the most part these films just demonstrated how out of touch they had become with the youth movement. It was with the Esther Williams movies, regardless of how fantastical they were, that showed Hollywood's true art.