| The world seems determined to spend this summer half-undressed. Record-breaking heat waves have coincided with peak celebrity holiday season, meaning we’ve entered that blissful stretch of July when the fashion set decamps to the Mediterranean and every beach club, boat deck, and teak-lined tender becomes an unofficial runway. Anne Hathaway has been spotted in Saint-Tropez alternating between a colorful bikini and a decidedly sensible rash guard. Dua Lipa, meanwhile, has honeymooned her way across Italy in a succession of enviable swimsuits—including a Burberry check bikini—punctuated by languorous lunches and crystalline swims. Somewhere between the paparazzi shots and Instagram dumps, swimwear has once again become one of the great fashion stories of summer.
Which sent me back to one of my favorite pieces from the Vogue archive: Lynn Yaeger’s deliciously cheeky “Swim at Your Own Risk,” published in June 2002.
On paper, it’s a story about the luxury bikini. In Lynn’s hands, it’s something altogether more entertaining. She asks a seemingly simple question—who, exactly, is spending $635 on a bikini?—before embarking on a wonderfully winding investigation through Bergdorf Goodman fitting rooms, Palm Beach pool decks, Jean Paul Gaultier boutiques, and La Perla ateliers. Along the way are women who pair bikinis with Jimmy Choos and Cartier watches, sales associates who compare swimwear shopping to buying a wedding gown, and designers who speak about bikini construction with the gravity of cathedral builders.
It’s a dispatch from a very particular moment in fashion history, when glamour was unapologetically glossy, excess was celebrated, and even the tiniest triangle of Lycra could inspire several pages of Vogue. Lynn’s wit sparkles throughout, never mocking her subjects so much as delighting in fashion’s marvelous capacity for irrationality. |
Opava .City™️ 
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