anacronyms

I don’t remember how I found it, but some time ago I wandered into the website of Wicked Weasel, an Australian line of micro-bikinis.

You’d think that a company like this would have their site stuffed with supermodel-types. After all, this kind of product would surely look better on enormously tall slender women, wouldn’t it?

I don’t think so.

Wicked Weasel claim to draw their models from women who come to the shop, and I find this entirely believable. The women featured in the Models section are real women: young, attractive women, for sure, but with wonderful lack of polish. The photos, while bathing-suit-modely in some cases, look unrehearsed and spontaneous. They don’t have the arched-back stretched-leg look of traditional glamor photography.

I guess that’s the difference: these women are beautiful, but they’re not glamorous. And that’s one of the reasons I like the site.

The best thing about it, though, is the Contributors section. WW runs a bikini contest in which people submit photos of themselves in their WW swimsuits. The thing I like most about it is that WW seem to be pretty egalitarian in their tastes. While many of the women they feature are young and slim, there are plenty of older bodies, and there is a noticeable dearth of the silicone that one tends to associate with tiny swimsuits.

This is one of my favourite photos from the Contributors section. The woman isn’t thin enough to be a traditional swimsuit model, but I think that makes her more beautiful. I love how the light caresses her back, how it makes her skin glow. She looks like an entirely natural woman in a natural setting. Oddly, it is the swimsuit that gives the photo sexual overtones: without it, she’d be a sleek hairless female animal in her preferred environment. With it, she becomes a woman at the seashore, obliged by rules to cover certain parts of her body.

Ironically, it is those rules that give these swimsuits their power. It takes a confident woman to wear one of these in places where nudity is forbidden. They’re a nod and a wink to the law. It is really a short step from wearing some of these to complete nudity, and that, in my opinion, is a good thing. I have never seen why we need to hide our bodies under clothing while we swim. Hopefully we will continue to liberate our opinions on these matters, and maybe in fifty years nobody will care if people swim nude or not.

I think it will happen. Within my lifetime, homosexuality has gone from being a completely hidden perversion to being an accepted part of society. I think swimming au natural isn’t beyond hope.