South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
What makes a bathing suit so expensive?
There is a machine in South Brooklyn that looks like a transparent coffin and whirs like an industrial fan. Its metallic innards flit and glide until, within an hour, it releases a swimsuit, dropped from the machine’s underbelly like an egg. It is a high-tech process that seems simple: Click a button, get a very nearly finished swimsuit.
Yet dozens of decisions were made before the idea of that swimsuit became a tangible thing — decisions that ultimately led to its being priced around $250 and not $25, which is roughly the amount an adult woman spends on a swimsuit in the United States, according to the market research analysts at the NPD Group.
But what do those decisions entail? What makes a swimsuit, in this economy, worth that much?
Fabric, for one. In this case, a soft yarn sourced from Japan after years of trial and error by designer Anna Berger of Deta.
Berger’s specialty is knitted swimwear. As such, her yarn needs to be special: quick-drying, so the suit maintains its shape, and resistant to sun and chemical damage, yet just as stretchy and durable as nylon, a much more common swimwear fabric.
Then there are labor and manufacturing costs. Last fall, after the knitwear factory Berger worked with in Los Angeles abruptly closed, a friend recommended that she bring her designs to Tailored Industry, a company in Brooklyn that produces whole pieces of made-to-order clothing on computerized knitting machines — those egglaying coffins. According to Berger, having a swimsuit manufactured at Tailored Industry costs about $65, not including the yarn she provides.
Once a garment is made, most designers try to sell pieces in bulk to retailers. To set their wholesale prices, designers typically double (or more) the total cost of making the garment, which is how they make a profit.
But stores then use similar math to make their own profits, meaning that the final retail price a shopper sees can be five times the cost of actually making the item. That is how a swimsuit that costs $65 to produce becomes $250 to buy. And that has been the hardest part of getting her business off the ground, said Berger, whose brand did not make a profit last year.
Buying a swimsuit used to be simpler
A decade ago, Victoria’s Secret was a powerful player in the swimsuit market. When it stopped selling swimwear in 2016, competitors saw an opportunity.
“That left a huge hole,” said Jenna Lyons, then the president and executive creative director of J. Crew. “But I think people were really longing for something else. It was so restrictive in terms of the way they were speaking to the customer.”
Instead of trying to be the “sexiest game on the beach,” J. Crew positioned its swimwear as more classic and simple, selling a more “natural sexiness,” said Lyons, who left the company in 2017.
Today the swimwear market is crowded with young brands targeting every type of shopper with prices that generally range from $100 to $400. The options can be overwhelming, amplified by the already emotional nature of swimsuit shopping.
“For a woman, the most vulnerable time of the year is swimsuit season,” Lyons said, ticking off a familiar list of insecurities: body fat, paleness, cellulite, gravity. “You’re half-naked, and you want everything to be perfect.”
Some swim labels have built their identities around these insecurities. The Instagram-popular brand Summersalt is dedicated, its co-founder Lori Coulter said, “to enabling women to feel the joy we all felt at the beach as children,” and “making sure they’re comfortable in the swimwear they’re wearing and the body that they have.”
Summersalt’s bestknown suit, a supercompressive one-shoulder design that extends to size 24 and was developed using measurements from the scans of 10,000 women’s bodies, costs $95. That’s largely because the company sells directly to consumers, avoiding wholesale markups.
“The truth is, no matter what income bracket you’re in, nobody wants to pay $400 for a swimsuit,” Coulter said.
But they may do it anyway. Kristen ClassiZummo, an apparel analyst for the NPD Group, said that in recent years, quality had become a top priority for shoppers, more than price. “We’re seeing consumers shift focus to longer lasting, better constructed apparel,” she said, “swimsuits being one of those main categories where we know fit and construction are very important.”
The ethics surcharge
At Mara Hoffman, a one-piece swimsuit costs about $300, a price attributed in part to how the brand creates its signature bold prints and customizes its fabrics, which are certified as recycled and free of harmful residue.
This year, it will introduce its first swimsuit made from cellulosic, or nonsynthetic, material. The timing could scarcely be better, considering that lead time for orders of recycled nylon, its main fabric, has grown from eight to 10 weeks to 40 to 50 weeks, Dana Davis, vice president for sustainability, product
and business strategy at Mara Hoffman, said.
Yet for designers with sustainable values, the cost of making swimwear doesn’t actually start rising significantly until production begins, after the design is already set.
“If you want to pay your sewers a living wage, that’s where the cost comes,” said Araks Yeramyan, the creative director of a namesake line of swimwear, lingerie and loungewear. “If you’re not going to make in China, and you’re not going to make a million gazillion pieces, it’s the actual sewing that costs the money.”
Yeramyan produces her label at factories in New York City, where the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and New Jersey, where it’s $13 an hour — that’s about the cost of a one-piece swimsuit sold right now on the fast-fashion website Shein (before markdowns).
But New York isn’t a popular market for swimwear production, meaning there are fewer specialized sewers there.
Still, Yeramyan understands that not everybody can pay $365 for a swimsuit, which is the upper range of her one-pieces. But in her experience, to make a swimsuit, especially with the kind of cutout designs she prefers, is, she said, “to fight with the body and the fabric.”
To do it ethically? “That’s really hard.”