Free-Hip Friday: Barbara Palvin, 2019

I mentioned that there weren’t a lot of freed hips in the 2019 issue.

I submit the curious case of this Barbara Palvin one-piece.

It reveals the whole side of her body, and the result is …

… kind of weird, to be honest. It’s an uncomfortable-looking slingshot effect.

It seems there’s a thin belt that is meant to be worn with it, and frankly the suit is much better looking with the belt attached.

I fancy myself a connoisseur of the one-piece, and part of my manifesto is that they are rarely improved by forced skimpification. If you want a bikini, get a bikini.

• • •

Kate Bock sports a similar style, a V that plunges down the body, starting at the breasts, with a belt to mark the halfway point of the journey.

I’m a big fan of a high-cut suit, but it’s possible to overdo it. Here, I think the back view suffers.

Kate is a slender model, and when the thong-style cut is too high, her, um, cheeks look elongated. A derrière like Kate’s needs a tighter frame to spotlight it.

Yes, like that!

• • •

Jasmine Sanders sports yet another swimsuit of this shape.

It just seems like a style that would look better on a curvier girl. Kate and Jasmine are quite petite.

But one thing the super-high-cut is good for is revealing the presence (or absence) of a tattoo along your inguinal crease. It’s there in Jasmine’s videos, but not her photos.

It’s evidence that the 2019 issue isn’t 100% natural after all.

Anyway, I guess I’m a fashion editor now.

Get a High-Cut, Hippy!

I feel I’ve droned on a bit about the high-cut swimsuits of the 80s and how they shaped my interest in the female body. But I’m impressed with how well 2018 has been infused with that decade.

It’s not just the cut of the suits. It’s the color schemes, patterns, accessories — maybe even the type of posing. I don’t know enough about modeling or photography to delve into the secret sauce, but I get a deep stirring of déjà vu at how well they invoke the decade I discovered the swimsuit issue.

These shots of Vita and Kate look for all the world like posters I might have hung in my bedroom in 1987.

And Hailey in this dream of neon yellow and grape-candy purple and retro roller skates makes me feel like I’m in seventh grade again.

But yeah, that high-cut thigh. Rookie Chase Carter even touches on it a bit in her Uncovered video. (She also makes a point of name-dropping Elle Macpherson, so that earns her additional points with me.)

I like Chase. She strikes me as a cuter Hannah Davis.

She also gives us this year's top-but-no-bottom entry.

Anyway, it’s high-cut heaven. And some girls seem determined to go above and beyond. There’s a lot of grabbing the hips and pulling skyward, as if to say “You want to see an acute angle? I’ll show you an acute angle!”

This Vogue article from last summer suggests this isn’t just pastiche. We might be in the midst of a legitimate reinvigoration of this cut. (A few familiar SI faces and bodies pop up in that article.)

Count me in.

Play Freeboob!

According to legend, the ancient mythical Amazons had one breast removed to allow them to become better archers.

I can only assume that was the inspiration behind these numbers sported by Kate Bock and Barbara Palvin.

These rather impractical one-piecers each cover only the right breast, leaving the left to be covered modestly by the palm of a hand.

They’re not good for beach volleyball, I guess is what I’m saying.

They’re not the first single-breast suits the swimsuit issue has shown us. Just last year, Hailey Clauson shared this number with us.

Now it’s the right breast that is free while the left one is hidden from view.

A couple years earlier, in 2015, Sara Sampaio and Sam Hoopes flaunted a couple of breasts: one left and one right.

Ten years earlier, in 2005, Anne V and Carolyn Murphy flaunted the same breast in possibly the same swimsuit.

And let us travel all the way back to 1990, when the lovely Elle Macpherson showed us what was right. (Marisa Miller followed suit in 2004.)

I have a feeling there are other examples that I wasn’t able to dig up. If I find more, I’ll update this post. But the current tally is 6 right breasts exposed, 3 left breasts exposed. (Or, if you're a pessimist, 3 right and 6 left concealed.)

But obviously, in order to be actual swimsuits, some additional cover would have to be added.

One that note, another theme of 2018 seems to be “mesh one-piece swimsuits so scandalous that they need to be worn with bikini bottoms underneath.”

See? Swimsuitologist is really just a fashion blog at heart.

• • •

You know what? Over a year later, I'm going to take the suggestion left in the comments by an anonymous tipster and include Kim Alexis here. Even though her back is to us, I think we can speculate that she's revealing her left and concealing her right. This is the suit referred to in the magazine, mysteriously, as "one-piece topless," and maybe that's what they meant.

Welcome, Kim!

Getting to the Bottom of Things

I realized something important.

Nina Agdal’s 2017 “vajazzle” is essentially Carolyn Murphy’s 2006 bikini bottom, without the bikini bottom.

• • •

In other swimsuit news, Emily Ratajkowski has been accused of swiping Lisa Marie Fernandez’s designs for her swimwear line.

Specifically, this segmented one-piece:

And this bikini top:

I’ve studied the matter at great length, and I think Lisa Marie has a case.

The Implications of Skimpification

Here’s a BBC article on the historical shrinking of swimwear, in conjunction with an exhibit at the Fashion and Textile Museum.

I don't care how much fabric is in those suits. These are sexy photos.

• • •

I’ve been contemplating why girls in swimsuits are sexier to me than girls in lingerie. I think I’ve stumbled upon something.

A bikini and a bra/panties combo are strikingly similar. They’re the same size and the same shape, and they cover the exact same areas of a woman’s body. But there’s a philosophical difference.

Lingerie is something a woman strips down to. A bikini is the outfit she puts on. The nearly identical articles of clothing are arrived at from opposite directions.

There’s something secretive about lingerie. In real life, seeing a woman dressed like that means she’s choosing to reveal herself to you in an intimate setting. (Which, make no mistake, is mind-blowingly sexy.)

But a swimsuit is worn publicly. The same amount of skin is shown, but there’s an air of “no big deal, I’m just swimming” about a bikini. I’m not sure I’ve put my finger on it, but it might be that the same level of sexuality is given a fun, everyday, celebratory personality to it.

It might account for that sense of “innocence” I have about the swimsuit issue that gets scandalized whenever a more overtly sexual approach pops up.

PSA: This shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it: Don’t gawk at swimsuit-clad women in public places. It’s a different situation. The models in SI are tacitly inviting your eyes. Women at the pool are minding their own business. Sure: glance, notice. But don’t be a freaking creep.

This is important to me, because I want a world where respecting women and finding them hot are not presumed to be mutually exclusive. And I never want a woman to regret wearing a bikini.

There was a Tumblr blog, now sadly gone, called Fuck Yeah Swimsuit Models. It featured an SI photo per day, sometimes with commentary. I noticed some of the photos were tagged “classic.” I assumed this referred to photos from a certain bygone golden era of the magazine, or possibly to photos the person running the blog particularly liked.

But then I noticed the blog included a definition of the term “classic.” Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I can share this definition with you:

Classic, as a tag on this blog, refers to a very specific kind of shot: the model is wearing (all of) a real bikini, on a sunny beach. It’s just the original, simple premise of the swimsuit issue itself, no gimmicks or partially-disrobed women. Another way to look at it: classic shots are straightforward enough that they could actually be used by a viewer to judge the swimsuit itself. (As if anyone would ever try to do that.)

Tori Praver, would you demonstrate?

NOT CLASSIC: Missing a top.

NOT CLASSIC: Missing a bottom.

NOT CLASSIC: Missing a beach.

NOT CLASSIC: The suit is a lie.

Classic.

There you have it. The swimsuit, as it appears in the wild.