BEACH BODY TORTURE
After 70 sizzling years the swimwear is still a fashion icon that stirs the passions, reports DAVID ROBSON
1966 along came Raquel Welch, recently voted the best bikini body ever. In One Million Years BC she wore an unforgettable fur-lined two-piece. She had only three lines in the film, three more than Diana had in the gondola, and she blew her out of the water. at Laughing Waters in Jamaica, a few miles along the coast from Goldeneye, the house where Fleming had written the book.
The white bikini, complete with belt and knife, is never to be forgotten. Nor, of course, is Ursula’s 36-24-36 frame (those were the days when statistics were vital).
When Bond (Sean Connery) sets eyes on her there is some pretty terrible acting and Last year there was an advertisement on the London Underground and on billboards with the headline BEACH BODY READY? The work of a weight-loss product called Protein World and showing a slim woman in a tiny yellow bikini, it provoked hundreds of complaints.
The objection was that it encouraged insecurity, not to mention anorexia. It provoked several hundred complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, a petition that attracted 70,000 signatures and a protest in London’sHyde Park under the banner “reclaim the beaches”. Reportedly it also increased business for Protein World.
“Bikini body” and “beach body” are words that appear in thousands of headlines and in the titles of many dozen books these days. Suddenly bikini becomes a challenge when it was supposed to be a liberation. You train to compete in the Olympics but not to go on holiday. What do you need for a bikini body? Just a body and a bikini. Last July in the French city of Reims a 21-year-old girl was attacked by a group of girls and emerged injured and bruised. She had been wearing a bikini in the park and they had shouted she was immoral. First response was that this was a religious protest. It turned out it was actually merely a fight between girl gangs but it provoked a bikini-clad protest across France demanding to wear whatever almost wherever. To you a bikini may be just a swimsuit, to others it’s a cause célèbre.