The year was 1997. Mike Tyson had bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear, and both Mother Teresa and The Notorious B.I.G. died within months of one another, but I was at home, plunked before a television set watching B*A*P*S (Black American Princesses), a buddy comedy starring Halle Berry and Natalie Deselle-Reid. The film, directed by the great Robert Townsend, tracks the journey of two Black women as they strive to create the world’s first combination hair salon and soul food restaurant. Never mind its 16% Rotten Tomato score and icy reviews by Roger Ebert and the Chicago Tribune,¹ from the very moment Halle Berry and her Coca-Cola red acrylics enter the frame, the camera panning up to her shining gold teeth and platinum blonde updo as she serves a plate of bacon and eggs in a Decatur greasy spoon, it is clear that B*A*P*S is a crucible for 90s cinema, particularly in the arenas of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nation. Berry and Deselle-Reid’s bodies emerge in each scene clothed anew–now, a baby blue diner uniform, then, a feather boa coat, yellow as a lemon’s rind. Indelible to my adolescent mind is the film’s cinematic bridge, a poolside setup-scene in which our on-screen buddies disrobe to their most revealing before a canonical plundering of Rodeo Drive, beginning their sartorial transition from working class Georgia peaches to California socialites. A chorus of housekeepers, landscapers, and personal cooks encircle the pool’s perimeter, standing with their hands clasped before them, delighted at the display. Deselle-Reid dons a polka dotted one-piece, straight out of the 19th century, complete with bloomers and frills, while Berry has swapped her red polish for golden mezcal, a complement to her tangerine bikini which shimmered everywhere the sun hit it. In ways I couldn’t yet articulate, this orange swimsuit, “that shade black girls do the most justice,”² signalled many kinds of liberation, including sexual and economic and I wanted to have a taste.

I bought my first bikini with some crumpled 20 dollar bills stuffed into an envelope and handed to me on the eve of my 16th birthday. The bottoms were Barbie pink with string ties on each side and the matching top was two tiny upside down triangles. The bikini had come to signify, to me, an escape from the sexual and social liminality of my childhood and so I eagerly took the strings into my hand, tied a knot over my hips, and looped the fabric between my thumb and first two fingers to make a bow. The debut of my bikini body–that is, my bikini and my body–at the local pool was my initiation, a ceremonial ritual after which I would undoubtedly emerge a young woman, Black and glamorous, my future bright with Valentino gowns and Chanel suits, just as it was for Halle Berry both on and off the screen –becoming an Academy Award-winning actress and a Bond girl, emerging from the ocean in yet another orange bikini, her own doppelganger. After B*A*P*S, my perception of the swimsuit and its social capital only crystallized throughout the 2000s with each music video that made 106 & Park’s daily countdown, where Black women walked, danced, or lounged on my TV screen in bikinis, every manner of hue, thread, and metal affixed to their hair, nails, and teeth. This was, for better or worse, my extracurricular education on sexuality, desirability, and visibility. Though their roles were often supporting the men whose songs occasioned a video, these bikini-clad women consistently stole the show, the men becoming incidental and a means to her own end and while shades of their objectification remained, what I really saw was a separation of power. The cultural value of the swimsuit, and its wielding by Black women, embodied everything I would come to learn about the pleasures and dangers of styling Blackness,³ as well as the performativity, irony, and politics of consumption and consumerism that invariably accompanies it.

In spite of my cultural foundation, the historical evolution of the swimsuit is largely credited to and embodied by white women both in images and literature. The timeline often begins with neoclassical paintings of Roman baths, featuring plump, nude women poorly swaddled in animal skins and dyed fabrics. Somewhere along the continuum one must encounter an image of the actress Brigitte Bardot in the film Manina, la fille sans voiles, better known in North America as Manina, the Girl in the Bikini, as well as “timelessly elegant” Grace Kelly picnicking on a Montego Bay beach.⁴ Adjectives like elegant, classic, and tasteful are frequent within the dominant swimsuit vocabulary that accompanies the progression of oppressive swimming costumes at the turn of the 20th century, up to the sexual revolution of the 60s. Yet, within the Black feminist liberatory consciousness, a tradition which actively undermines misogyny, respectability, and eurocentric ideologies of discretion, nouns like power, pleasure, wonder, and want are what defined my knowledge of the swimsuit, marked by deviant interactions with prevailing notions of luxury and glamour. My own appraisal of the swimsuit as a social semiotic began with B*A*P*S but, for instance, as early as the 1910s, radical Black women from all over New York were visiting Coney Island to “make love on the beach”⁵ in their skin tight swimsuits that skirted the very edge of indecent exposure laws.⁶ That the swimsuit figures in a revolutionary act on the bodies of Black women comes as no surprise, as the Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall suggests, we have always worked on ourselves as the canvases of representation through style and its performance.⁷

The same year B*A*P*S arrived on the big screen, model Tyra Banks made headlines and history as the first Black woman⁸ on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the magazine which, along with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is credited with legitimizing the bikini as a garment.⁹ On the honour of covering this 1997 issue which features Banks in the Bahamas, sporting a raspberry polka dotted bikini, the model says “I didn’t think it was possible because of the color of my skin. I want to thank Sports Illustrated for thinking different, and I say different without an -ly, for being daring and for making every little black girl that year that saw that issue go, ‘Oh my God, mama, I think I’m pretty because a black girl’s on the cover just like me.’ ”¹⁰ The magazine’s editor, however, said of Banks’ cover: “We live in a multicultural society. Her look is individual to her. Her ethnicity is sort of secondary…It was just so quintessentially sexy, and wholesome at the same time.”¹¹ In different ways, they were both talking about whiteness and its violent conditioning of beauty standards. The use of words like quintessential and wholesome illustrate the actual function of beauty, which is not about how we look but about the preferences that reproduce the existing social order, often endorsed by cultural authorities and capitalistic pursuits.¹² It is no surprise, then, that Halle Berry, with her lighter skin and thinner body, is not only the true lead of B*A*P*S, but also the beneficiary of material and professional success in Hollywood at large, in comparison to Deselle-Reid who passed away in 2020 with only a handful of minor roles under her belt, “underrated, passed over, and deprived of the platform she truly deserved.”¹³ This, too, is the work of the swimsuit.

Long before Sports Illustrated discovered Black women in 1997, scores of Black girls’ self worth had been bolstered by the archive of swimsuit models gracing the covers of Ebony and Jet magazines since 1945. These, along with Essence and Vibe, were gathered into little piles all over my mother’s beauty salon, many of them with titilliating headlines like “Should young widows with children remarry?” and “Astrology: racket or science?”¹⁴ My favourite was Vibe, mainly because of the rappers who frequently gave candid interviews and five page spread photoshoots. Whether on the page or on set or in concert, rappers like Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Eve, Trina, and Nicki Minaj, by universal decree it seemed, had adopted the swimsuit as their uniform, and certainly theirs was not a quest for a tolerable and derivative sense of elegance or beauty, even though the bikinis barely clinging to their bodies were often Christian Dior and Fendi. In 1996, Lil’ Kim released her debut album Hard Core, which featured her spread eagle in a leopard print bikini, her mouth slightly open and gesturing towards the pleasure I would reap from the disc inside, the opening lyrics being “I used to be scared of the dick / now I throw lips to the shit, handle it like a real bitch.”¹⁵ One year later, Kim went on tour with Puff Daddy & The Family, performing in a suite of bikinis on stage, including a chartreuse top and bottom with matching fur coat and sunglasses, a look that Beyoncé would recreate for Halloween, a tribute to the enormous offering the original Queen Bee bestowed upon hip-hop and the culture at large. The release of Hard Core ushered in a new epoch of rap, one that centred on women–no longer restricted to the role of video vixen or fly girl–and their desires, carnal and otherwise. The bikini, for Kim, rendered this conversion visible and became yoked to an ongoing aesthetic and political negotiation of gender and desire that her rap progeny continue to this day: “Two-piece bikini, Fendi mink draggin' on the floor / Kim been the first lady since I dropped Hard Core.”¹⁷

Some twenty-five years after Lil’ Kim’s debut and Tyra Banks’ cover, the swimsuit seems to have reached its apotheosis with Megan Thee Stallion. The Houston born rapper, whose repertoire and persona can be deliciously summed up in the lyric “I like to drink and I like to have sex,”¹⁸ recently became the first female rapper to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated, and although she credits Banks’ 1997 cover for leading the way, saying "It made me think, maybe I can be on the cover of SI Swim one day. And guess what—I am!,"¹⁹ Megan’s cover is working overtime. For one, this is a woman who refuses to collude with beauty as it intersects with circumscribed notions of innocence, which is what Megan’s slackened bottom lip tells us long before we notice the baby pink ballerina nails, her bejeweled belly button, and trademark thick thighs (“Put them legs on his head, now he love tall women”²⁰). Within the magazine's pages, Megan wears a suite of swimsuits: leopard print, electric blue, orange, and combinations of fuschia, teal, and green. All of them are from her own swimwear collection, an aesthetic reminder that “female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when–especially when–it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.”²¹ Not unlike the freedom Halle Berry and Natalie Deselle-Reid sartorially inaugurated with their swimsuits, and fulfilled by the film’s ending with a one hundred million dollar endowment. And also Josephine Baker, whose crystalline, banana embellished bikini made her the biggest Black female star in the world in 1926, and a millionaire by the age of 26 (coincidentally Megan Thee Stallion’s current age), reaching across decades and oceans to inspire the cash-prize winning costume in the 1997 Jamaican classic Dancehall Queen. The swimsuit, though slight in its composition, is never frivolous, especially when wielded by Black women, who are not only communicating the social and economic pressures of their time and locus, but establishing a dialectic that is often affirming, sometimes ironic, but always meaningful in its failure to be respectable.

I never did get the chance to debut my pink string bikini. My mother took one look at me, my chest glistening with coconut oil, my body reeking of Victoria Secret’s Love Spell, and made me change into a modest one-piece. I never saw that bikini again, and where it went I will never know. I still had a taste, even though my public initiation was interrupted, because the swimsuit, as it seems to me, does its best work on dry land, unmediated by the lascivious eyes of men and boys my mother feared would devour me. Those few moments at home, alone, in front of the mirror had blessed me with the vision of my own loveliness, as though Aphrodite’s girdle itself, finely wrought of gold and shimmering like the moon, enveloped me with its graces. A marvel to see.²²