“Swim at Your Own Risk,” by Lynn Yaeger, was originally published in the June 2002 issue of Vogue.
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This, then, is hell: not whatever Jean-Paul Sartre may have suggested, but you, alone, under the hot lights of the fitting room, staring into a three-way mirror at your untanned flesh in a bathing suit.
“It’s the thing women say they like least in the world to do,” says Necha Treitel, a saleswoman in Bergdorf Goodman’s swimsuit department. “You see the absolute best bodies, but you end up being in the dressing room with them for a long time—they need plenty of hand-holding.” Over the last few seasons, Treitel has had a lot more than workaday Lilly Pulitzers and Gottexes to offer her clientele: Runway designers who until recently confined themselves to big nights and boardrooms have lately expanded their vision to include the beach, and the result is a bathing-suit market swimming with perky Moschinos, oversexed Cavallis, camouflage Gallianos, and butterfly-bedecked Guccis.
Unfortunately, just as a pair of Louboutin flip-flops bears little resemblance, cost-wise, to the ones sold out of bins, prestige swimwear sports a price tag that no one would call shy. But somehow this doesn’t seem to matter to the growing number of women who think wearing hot-label bathing suits is as important (and as much fun) as clomping around; the pool in the latest Jimmy Choos and a late-model Cartier watch. Why else would some denizens of Palm Beach spend $ 1,045 on this year’s Leonard of Paris caftan and a matching $385 Leonard maillot when another gardenia-print cover-up might do the job as well? For the same reason not every fringed a I purse is a Balenciaga.
“This is the exact same print we sell on our third floor,” says Treitel, fingering a filmy silk-chiffon Chloé peasant blouse ($375) that’s meant to go over a Chloé swimsuit ($235) of a matching pattern (a design that includes dinosaurs, sea birds, and what appears to be a fat guy sitting on a beach). “This Missoni cover-up could definitely double as a dress!” she adds, showing off a slinky number in that company’s trademark flame-stitched stripes.
“Look at this La Perla!” Treitel chuckles, brandishing a creation made of twin metal-mesh squares that looks like a deconstructed evening purse. You might think this item is meant to cover the transparent top of an itty $635 La Perla suit, but no, it is actually intended to shield the bottom of the bikini, fore and aft.
“Yes, we made that!” Gianluca Flore, La Perla’s CEO, confesses. “But really, everything else we have, I promise, can go in the water.” Flore has curly brown hair, Mediterranean-blue eyes, and an Italian accent. He refuses to admit that there’s anything scary about swimsuit shopping. “What do you mean?” he asks, looking a little hurt. “How can it be a nightmare? Because it goes by emotion?”
La Perla may, it is true, prey upon our subconscious desires (does anyone really know why she suddenly craves an army-green beaded bikini?), but the company never loses sight of what makes a suit a suit. “We understand the cups, the bottoms,” Flore says, “because we started as a lingerie company.” Indeed, from a structural point of view, La Perla’s minuscule suits are feats of delicate engineering as impressive as the Ponte Vecchio.
La Perla got its start in an apartment in Bologna 50 years ago, and the firm retains a European perspective to this day. “What we noticed, as a foreign company, was that ten years ago in America, people were using bathing suits as something to wear to go in the water.” Flore observes, raising an eyebrow in faint disbelief. “This was not true in Europe. There they were thinking about the lifestyle behind the beach. When they shopped, they looked for the lifestyle.”
