CAPITOLA — Being a seaside town, Capitola has attracted many to its beaches over the last century and a half, and among many changes over the years have been the types of swimsuits worn by beachgoers.
From the heavy bathing costumes of the Victorian era to the modern bikini, women’s swimsuits have changed significantly over time, and seemingly each new iteration has yielded fresh complaints about showing off too much — even bare arms! The Capitola Historical Museum has cataloged this history in its new exhibit, “The Naughty Surf – Fashion Turning Points in Capitola 1860s-1960s.”
Curator Deborah Osterberg said the exhibit was inspired by a quote that was used in last year’s exhibit on the 150th anniversary of Camp Capitola. A Stockton minister identified only as the Rev. Bane lamented in an 1888 Stockton Evening Mail article titled “The Naughty Surf,” that modern bathing suits were “an abomination to decency and to modesty.”
“That’s what gave me the idea for this year,” she said. “I thought that was a great title. That’s why it ended up tracing the evolution from the Victorian bathing costume to the modern swimsuit.”
The exhibit also showcases how social norms changed over a century, especially for women, and particularly how that was reflected in clothing worn along Capitola’s seaside.
The earliest bathing suits highlighted were bathing costumes mostly designed with materials like flannel and wool. This attire was used for the growing practice of “surf bathing,” where people bathed in saltwater to help stimulate circulation and cure ailments. This practice was initially common in England, then spread to U.S. East Coast seaside resorts and then to the West Coast in places like Capitola. Throughout it all, people would wear bulky suits, hence the term “bathing suits.”
“For women in the Victorian era, it was a very conservative era with modest dressing,” said Osterberg. “The women had to be covered all the way from the neckline all the way down. It was more like a skirt with pantaloons underneath. They also still had to wear opaque stockings.”
One of these suits is on display at the museum.
This fashion began to change with Annette Kellerman, an Australian swimmer who had to wear braces on her legs as a child and turned to swimming as a way to regain her strength. In 1905, she took a more skintight men’s bathing suit and added stockings for a new one-piece suit known as a “figure suit” that showed off Kellerman’s arms.
“The older bathing costumes weren’t really meant for swimming,” said Osterberg. “They were meant for surf bathing, just to dip yourself in the water to get that benefit of the saltwater. But for somebody who wants to swim, it was very inconvenient.”
Kellerman’s suit caused quite a stir, but as more women became involved in competitive swimming, it became the norm. Locally, Capitola co-founder Henry Rispin hosted the Rispin Cup that brought swimmers in to compete.
The stockings were dropped after World War I, and throughout the 1910s and ’20s, these new bathing suits were seen as scandalous, leading many municipalities to determine how to deal with them. The exhibit features artifacts such as New York’s “10 Commandments” of what women could or could not wear, and photos of a man measuring a woman’s bathing suit skirt to ensure it was no more than 6 inches above the knee before going onto a beach in Washington, D.C., and a woman getting arrested in Chicago.
Osterberg said this was never much of an issue in Santa Cruz. In fact, a Sentinel article from 1915 opined that, “Whether they shock our sense of modesty, that is for each individual to state for himself.”
“They seemed to be fairly accepting,” said Osterberg.
Eventually, this furor over the modern one-piece swimsuit died down and became the standard. But these debates were reignited in 1946 with the invention of the bikini by Louis Réard. Osterberg said that while two-piece swimsuits were already commercially available at that point, they always covered the navel.
“The belly button had to be covered in those original two-pieces because if you would see the belly button, it would make you think of the umbilical cord and then that would make you think of being pregnant,” she said. “Those were some topics they didn’t want to have brought to mind.”
This changed with the introduction of Réard’s bikini, named for the Bikini Atoll reef in the Marshall Islands where the first nuclear weapon testing took place a few days earlier.
“This one book that I looked at said the name bikini was meant to associate explosions with the impact the suit would have on its lookers,” said Osterberg.
Now a common sight in any swim setting, the bikini was very controversial when it was introduced because of how much of the body it exposed. One detractor was none other than Kellerman who felt the bikini showed too much, including “a line that makes the leg look ugly, even with the best of figures.”
“It’s kind of interesting that, even though she was revolutionary in her era, she didn’t like the latest style,” said Osterberg.
With the growth of the counterculture movement in the ’60s, the bikini became a lot more commonplace and some began advocating for swimming without suits altogether — an idea that to this day has not caught on outside of certain beaches.
And that is where the exhibit’s story ends, as Osterberg felt this sufficiently covered a 100-year period. The rest of the museum is filled with displays of different bathing suits — from a Victorian suit to a modern bikini purchased at Nubia — a display of hats from the periods covered and Barbie dolls modeling the various swimwear. There is also a bathing cap worn by Peggy Slatter Matthews, a professional swimmer and former Capitola city councilwoman whose Water Fantasy Carnival gave way to the city’s long-running Begonia Festival.
Osterberg said the museum is accepting copies of photos of people or their ancestors in bathing suits on Capitola Beach from the 1960s or earlier, which will be displayed on electronic photo frames.
“That way, everybody can be a part of the exhibit,” she said.
Osterberg said the exhibit is a good showcase for how people have reacted to changes in fashion over the decades and how the Santa Cruz area was mostly immune to any outrage. If anything, the exhibit is a reminder that ongoing debates about the modesty of certain bathing suits date back more than a century.
“It’s kind of an old story that gets repeated whenever there’s something new,” she said.
“The Naughty Surf” is on display through the end of December at the Capitola Historical Museum, 410 Capitola Ave. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. Admission is free, but donations are accepted. A reception featuring a talk by Osterberg is 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. For information, go to Facebook.com/capitolahistoricalmuseum or call 831-464-0322.