How topless sunbathing went out of fashion
Anne-elisabeth Moutet on how her French compatriots are now covering up
There are very few causes that can bring together France’s most radical feminists and the law-and-order members of Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet.
But the right to bare your breasts on a public beach, at any age, without being told to cover up, is definitely one – as demonstrated this week by the general outcry across the country.
Several women, sunbathing wearing only their bikini bottoms at Sainte-marie-la-mer, a beach near Perpignan, were ordered to put their tops on by two gendarmes after a complaint lodged by “a family” whose children were, they claimed, “offended”.
It brings to mind Brigitte Bardot’s 1956 film, And God
Created Woman, credited with starting the practice of sunbathing topless. Not to mention the wildly popular Sixties film series Le Gendarme de Saint Tropez, in which France’s greatest comic actor, Louis de Funès, plays an inefficient gendarme trying, and failing, to halt Bardot-inspired seminudity.
What followed from such a strong cultural tradition was probably to be expected. In the wake of this week’s cover-up, France rose as a single woman to protest against this encroachment of what we regard as an “essential freedom”. In previous summers, we French have fought over the full-coverage burkini, which is banned by a number of resorts and most municipal swimming pools. Now we have reconciled over its polar opposite. The Gendarmerie Nationale apologised for the “overreach” of two mere “reservists”, while home secretary Gérald Darmanin tweeted that “Liberty is a precious asset”... the latter word being the operative.
What’s fascinating is that, despite our rallying cry to preserve the right, topless sunbathing has dramatically decreased in France. A recent study by polling group IFOP revealed that from the 43 per cent of women who chose to ditch their bikini tops in 1984, we are now down to 19 per cent who still brave the sun for a perfectly tanned décolleté. Many of the respondents said that they were afraid of leering or worse: an effect of Metoo, but also of a climate where women are insulted because they wear short skirts – as happened to one woman in Paris, when a bus driver told her “you should dress properly” and refused to let her board. While we still do not understand the foreign obsession with “wardrobe malfunctions” (the American hullabaloo at Janet Jackson’s collapsing neckline at the Superbowl in 2004 bemused us), we are perhaps more aware of the coarsening of street harassment, with legislation to issue fines for catcalling on the street and public transport introduced in 2018, and 700 men penalised in the first year.
I’ve never gone topless in my life, for two reasons. The chief one is that I decided early on that I didn’t like roasting myself in the sun. I have the kind of pale skin that burns to lobsterred before I manage to achieve, with great effort, exactly the same “tan” that’s indistinguishable from everyone else’s winter colouring. The other is that I have, not to put too fine a point on it, large boobs, given to unattractive wobbling – exactly the Donald Mcgill seaside postcard type that got one ogled even in the liberal Nineties.
Our German neighbours now win in the topless stakes: 34 per cent of women there say they sunbathe topless or in the nude (and in a country whose beaches are on the North Sea). In Spain, many women, remembering the Franco years, make a political statement of going topless. We French women find that topless works best for those of us unfairly blessed with model-thin looks and flat chests – the kind that allows you to wear any fashion, or indeed no fashion at all. In France, where chic is as competitive as it is performative, it’s mostly been about scoring extra points.
It comes as no surprise that the three women on the Sainte-marie-lamer beach were in their 60s. They lived through the sexual revolution, when female desire mattered, men were not the enemy, and the occasional catcall was not confused with assault. (Honestly, when construction workers whistle at me in the street, I take it as a welcome pick-me-up, and walk with a jauntier step.) Today’s hectoring is very different.
And so is fashion. Coco Chanel, who ushered in the new cult of sun worship a century ago, is now considered as the Mother of All Skin Cancers. Deep tans are passé. We know the sun damages our complexion, is the first cause of melanoma, and that once you’ve used up your “tan capital” – from the very first moment when, as a small child, you are let out without sun cream – your epidermis becomes defenceless.
The leggy, tanned models of the Nineties catwalks have been replaced by equally leggy, pale waifs now favoured by edgy designers and couture houses alike. The one fashion plate who still sports a tan is, significantly, the Louis-vuitton armoured Brigitte Macron, 67 – a singularly unafraid woman.
Britain was never at the fighting front of topless bathing. Britannia rules the waves with both her breasts modestly covered – perhaps understandably given the British summer climate – whereas Delacroix’s Liberté storms a Paris barricade in 1830 with her chest proudly exposed.
Still, les petites Anglaises, much beloved of the French, from Jane Birkin to Charlotte Rampling, went with the flow from the Sixties onwards. One of my English colleagues recalls asking their teacher if they could sunbathe topless on their school French exchange in the Eighties. This is now a thing of the past. To us French, your new prudishness looks like reverting to Victorian type. But we would say that, wouldn’t we?