Bathingsuit Blues not just for Women

I love that the NY Times printed an article about a man having drama with picking a bathing suit. I think sometimes we women forget (or don't realize) we're not the only one's out there with body issues struggling to find the perfect fit.

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Does This Swimsuit Make Me Look Fat?

By Henry Alford

IN its Platonic ideal, a bathing suit removes you momentarily from yourself, and perhaps unleashes heretofore dormant aspects of your personality. Wriggle into a great-looking suit that’s black and snug and tailored, and suddenly you’re ready for an underwater cocktail party; rock a pair of floral Hawaiian board shorts and suddenly you’re convinced that the only way to spell “dude” is with two o’s.

My annual quest for such a garment got its kick-start in late May when a friend e-mailed me a link to a site called Socialite Life, which featured a folio of 23 photos breathlessly headlined “Jude Law: Shirtless in Cannes!” Squinting rakishly in the brilliant Mediterranean light, Jude looked worldly, post-coital, regnant.

When you clicked on the upper left hand of the first photo, you learned (incorrectly, I found out too late) that Jude’s fetching canary-yellow bathing suit was from Dsquared2 and cost $268. I downloaded the image, and hied myself to Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue, where I showed it to a smiley salesman in his 20s named Beau.

I told Beau, “I want to be mistaken for Jude Law.”

I explained, “My looks are kind of preppy and innocent, so I need a suit that will take me to ‘wayward English schoolboy’ rather than ‘toffee-nosed prat.’ ” Beau said, “I understand.”

I did not tell Beau about how I recently dropped my Scrabble board and tiles onto the sidewalk in the middle of Sheridan Square, creating a clattering hailstorm of nerddom; I did not tell Beau that I recently had a heated discussion about the use of the semicolon.

The store, alas, could not find the fetching canary yellow suit, but Beau whisked me through the men’s department, showing me other options. We hit Etro, Michael Bastian, Thom Browne. When we saw six black, slinky suits coiled like snakes in the Dolce & Gabbana section, I said, “Ooh, these might be too Jude Law.”

Once in the dressing room with Beau’s and my three picks, I came face to face with a thorny verity: It is the curse of the middle-aged male body simultaneously to shrink and enlarge. Your belly pooches out, ever more parabolic, while your legs dwindle down to mere sticks, two knobby rods with the surface tension of plucked poultry. One day you look down at your half-sphere atop its two spindly rods and realize, “I’ve turned into a Weber grill.”

The suit most flattering to my Weber grill was a pair of belted, snug-fitting, mid-thigh $230 Orlebar Brown trunks. “These are Jude-like,” I told Beau as we gazed into the fitting rooms’ mirror. “Jude would accessorize them with designer shades, a shirt unbuttoned to the navel, and a whisper of Drakkar Noir masking a base of animal ripeness.” Beau’s eyes widened, and I sensed that he wanted to introduce me to a licensed professional who could tell me all about lithium.

Alas, the color of the Orlebar Brown trunks (fiery tomato) was too bracing for my Pepperidge Farm brand of wholesome. I headed on to Saks, where I showed my Jude photo to three salesmen. But they also couldn’t find the yellow trunks. A thin, expressionless young Michael York look-alike showed me other possibilities, but I demurred. I apologized and said, “I think I’m hung up on looking like ...”

“... Yeah, yeah, yeah: Jude Law.”

Eager not to beat a dead horse, I left my photo of Jude at home for my next two bouts of shopping. During the course of two days, I would visit eight more stores and try on 26 more suits. I loved the festive, Lilly Pulitzer-esque prints at Vilebrequin (which, as I now know, made the Jude Law swimsuit), but the suits’ puffy, bustle-like silhouettes vaulted my pear shape from Bosc to Bartlett; I loved the contained but non-packagey look of one pair of Marc Jacobs’s trunks, but wondered if I wanted to pay $345 for something that would be riding shotgun with a lot of cocoa butter and PABA.

A perfect fit kept eluding me, and kept me from being the best Jude I could be. A pair of knee-length board shorts in a floral print at Osklen in SoHo looked great except for a strange gap they created between their waistband and my spine.

“These make me look like I have a little storage area,” I said to the salesclerk, a sly brunette in her 20s. “A place for pencils or filberts.” (Her: “Yeah.”)

In another instance, it was equally the fit and the fit’s attendant implications that slowed me in my tracks. “I can’t tell what the look is,” I said to an H & M salesclerk referring to a pair of $17.95 tight navy square-cut nylon trunks with a red, white and blue rope belt. I asked, “Is it randy French sailor, or is it Fourth of July picnic on the town green?” Harried, she told me: “They’re Swedish, that’s all I know. They’re from Sweden.”

My favorite salesclerk was a middle-aged woman who was eating a salad when I walked into her tiny, messy boutique, Pesca, on East 60th.

“I like the elastic waistband,” I said of one of her suits, all made by a company called Sauvage; she explained, “they use a very good Lycra.” She left her desk to come look at me standing in front of the mirror in a sky-blue mid-thigh number. “I’m 49 years old,” I told her, “but in these I look 48.” She said I looked sexy. I thought of my Jude fixation and confessed to her, “I probably want the world to think I’m sauvage, but in reality I’m more domestique. In reality, I’m more médecin de campagne.” She asked if I was a doctor.

I finally hit pay dirt at Parke & Ronen, a Chelsea boutique that sells many scanty men’s clothes hammered in the forge of brazen confidence. The store’s fitting mirror, unlike the ones at all the other stores I visited, faces out onto the street. The mirror’s daunting amount of requisite exhibitionism rattled me when I skittishly looked at myself in the first suit, but by suit No. 5, calmed by the store’s friendly staff, I was shirtless, unfazed and furtively bopping to the Lady Gaga throbbing over the sound system.

I loved a pair of fitted $95 Parke & Ronen four-inch trunks in a blue, green and purple floral paisley on a white background; they had a two-grommet tie waist that cinched away all Weber-based impurity. The suit’s overall effect was slightly ... swinging London. Slightly ... Jude Law dirty weekend. Kuh-ching.

I first wore the suit to the N.Y.U. pool, where its comparative jauntiness, against a backdrop of collegiate Speedos and board shorts, was galvanizing. I can’t say I swam any faster, but I certainly swam with more verve.

I wore it one sunny afternoon on my building’s roof deck, where I didn’t need to sip at a Pimm’s Cup or a Campari; both were implied. I wore it to my office one hot day. Indeed, so comfortable and unbosomed was I in it that I decided to wear it for a trip I’ve happily made four times before: out to Amagansett, where I like to spend the night on the beach.

I made a reservation on the jitney. Doubting that any changing room would be open by the time I reached the beach at 7 p.m., I wore the suit under my pants to make the trip out to Long Island; as I boarded the bus, I found myself smiling slightly, and thought, “I am wearing very exciting underpants!”

I spent a lovely, contemplative evening picnicking and walking around a deserted beach in the suit (though it was, alas, too cold to swim); I crawled into my sleeping bag at 10 p.m. The suit’s smoothness felt satiny and delightful against the sleeping bag’s slippery insides: a hot dog in a bun. The surf raged, the stars twinkled. I felt new and brimming. Jude at last.

But then, just after midnight: blindingly bright car headlights aimed at my head. “Hey! Hey!” yelled a male voice from inside an East Hampton Marine Patrol vehicle. The officer then asked, with some irritation, “Why are you sleeping on the beach?” Groggily, I explained, “I just bought a new bathing suit.” He snorted and said: “You just bought a new bathing suit! What kind of reason is that?” I mumbled an incoherent answer. He wrote me a summons.

It was too late to call anyone. Back up in Amagansett, I sat on a bench on Route 27 and waited for a 4:20 a.m. jitney back home. “Jude, Jude, Jude,” I thought, “Where have you taken me?” Many inebriated 20-something revelers sauntered by, including a young woman skittering in high heels who, on hearing that I was waiting for a 4:20 bus, gushed: “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Moments later, I took my summons out of my pocket and gazed at it. I contemplated the embarrassment of a forthcoming appearance at the East Hampton Town Justice Court. I thought, I’ll definitely need to be at my most confident and cool for that. I thought, I’ll definitely need to be at the top of my game. I thought, I’ll definitely need to wear the suit.

Bikini Bashing

Okay. I'm not here to bash bikinis. I have nothing against bikinis or the women who wear them. What I do have issues with is exactly what this article addresses. Magazines, commercials, gossip news, etc making women never feel they're good enough to wear bikinis.

Too much stomach.

Too much thigh.

Too little boob.

Who cares!?

If you like it.
If you feel good in it.
WEAR IT!
...and everyone else can screw off!

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‘Bikini-Ready’? Who’s Judging?

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

EVERY spring, as sure as cherry blossoms bloom, so does the notion that women should diet, exercise and even liposuction their way to bikini-ready bodies. Magazines like Shape and Self reinforce the idea that preparation is essential, with months-long bikini body countdowns (100-calorie snack tips included) and workout DVDs like “Bikini Ready Fast!” as if the beach reveal were a test on par with the MCAT and only a slacker would settle for a one-piece.

“It really sends the message that you’re not worthy right now to put on a suit,” said Malia Mills, a swimsuit designer whose brand’s motto is “Love Thy Differences.” Ms. Mills, 44, said shoppers often declare in one of her 10 stores: “I just wanted to see what you had. I’m coming back when I lose five pounds.”

As our culture increasingly enshrines physical perfection, the bikini has come to inspire dread and awe. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s, when bellybutton-baring suits first became popular in America, “it was a youthful phenomenon definitely,” said Sarah Kennedy, the author of “The Swimsuit: A History of Twentieth-Century Fashions.” Then the high-fashion set and movie stars began to put on bikinis, and by the ’70s, she said, the bikini was “worn by all ages.”

And a few extra pounds didn’t disqualify anyone, considering the fitness revolution was still roughly a decade away. (In the book there’s a 1940s photograph of a fresh-faced still-brunet Marilyn Monroe looking smashing in a blue-and-white striped two-piece, a roll of pale flesh at her midsection.)

Back then, bikini preparation was starkly laissez-faire by today’s grooming standards. In her recently published literary memoir, “Art and Madness,” Anne Roiphe wrote that in 1965, she suspected that a suitor was into her because of, not in spite of, the “tufts of dark hair that stuck out of the top of my bikini.”

But today it’s assumed that only the lean, muscular, hairless and ab-defined will feel comfortable in a bikini. “It’s become difficult to feel natural with a normal body,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Fatism has taken over. It’s O.K. to be mean to lumpy, lardy people. It’s a sort of subtle intolerance towards people that’s very bad.”

Thanks to the ubiquity of cameras, wearing a bikini is now scary even for gorgeous celebrities. Remember how Jennifer Love Hewitt was pilloried in 2007 for the crime of wearing a bandeau without being a size 0? Helen Mirren was accused of having had surgery when she dared to flaunt her (taut, toned) 62-year-old stomach in a tomato-red bikini a year later.

“It’s about everyone everywhere having a comment, and they are anonymous,” said Gabrielle Reece, the former volleyball star and now a fitness guru, who has also been captured bare-stomached by the paparazzi. “The bathing suit is really a metaphor for all the ways we can approach a lot of things,” she said. “Why would we punish ourselves when we don’t have to? Why dread that?”

But the bikini has become the star of several fear-inspiring marketing campaigns. A recent advertisement for Yoplait Light features an itsy-bitsy yellow-and-red polka dotted bikini hanging on a wall as a future award for the diligent yogurt eater.

Nivea has a Goodbye Cellulite, Hello Bikini! Challenge, which prods women to slim down and buy its products. Nivea also sponsors the Cosmopolitan Magazine Bikini Bash, which last year involved 100 lithe dancers in blue-and-white ruffled bikinis tossing their hair violently to the Midi Mafia’s song “Two-Piece” in front of 1,000 attendees at the Planet Hollywood resort in Las Vegas. The two male singers of “Two-Piece,” fully clothed, belted, “You all look like models off the cover of Cosmo.”

Amansala, a “bikini boot camp,” in Ibiza, Spain, and Tulum, Mexico, sells six-night stays starting at $1,875. “Our society definitely has a stigma of bikini readiness — my business thrives on that,” said Melissa Perlman, an owner of the resort, which she said mostly attracts women in their 30s and 40s. “But at the same time, we send a different message that you don’t have to be perfect. Feel good, take care of yourself, and looking good in a bikini will follow.”

Would-be attendees often call ahead asking, “Do all the women look like those on your Web site?” (That is, easy on the eyes and the jiggle.) Ms. Perlman said she was considering starting “a program for larger women who don’t want to be around women who look hot in their bikinis, but say, ‘I want to do this.’ ”

On April 12, Dr. Elie Levine, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Dr. Jody Levine, a dermatologist, hosted a bikini season prep event at their Manhattan practice to cater to the worried (19 women and one man showed up). The doctors’ press release warned, “Summer is about revealing yourself and can be dreaded if your body is not ready,” then went on to list tips such as “zap away embarrassing veins” or “boost bikini confidence with lipo for stubborn areas.”

This month, when I visited the doctors, at the end of the interview, I hoisted my shirt, pointed to the crepey skin under my bellybutton, and grabbed a pinch of fat that wasn’t there before childbirth, back in my triathlete days. The Levines’ prescription: liposuction, a skin-tightening procedure, or a tummy tuck, which costs $10,000, with a painful recovery.

It might just be cheaper to gain a fresh perspective. “If you feel your body is strong, and you’re in good shape, you’re halfway there,” said Norma Kamali, 65, the designer of (among other things) modestly retro bathing suits, who now also has a wellness cafe in Manhattan. “You’re not going to go out looking for surgery to fill up your breasts, you’ll be satisfied and comfortable.”

Not all women let the camera-phone-wielding bikini police (or their own self-criticism) stop them from enjoying a two-piece. Ms. Mills calls this type a “good-attitude girl.”

“She is a phenomenon and totally inspiring,” she said. “She is of any age, any body, she has a totally great attitude, because she has had a come-to-Jesus moment with her body.”