The Skirt Outside The Trunks
There is a detail in the history of male bathing regulation that I keep returning to because it seems to say more than the regulation intended to say. Male bathing costumes in early twentieth-century America were required to include a skirting outside the trunks for modesty, or a man could wear flannel knee-length pants together with a vest.
The skirt outside the trunks. An external skirt, worn over a pair of drawers, on a man, in the water.
The practical question that this garment raises is what exactly it was supposed to be preventing. If the purpose were to cover the genitals, the trunks would suffice. The skirt outside the trunks covers the trunks, which already cover what the trunks were apparently insufficient to cover. What the skirt manages is not the genitals but the outline of what surrounds them—the shape of the thighs, the suggestion of what lies between them, the silhouette of the lower male body made visible by the wet fabric of the trunks clinging to it. The skirt was covering the implication rather than the fact. It was managing not the male body but the idea of the male body, which the trunks alone were unable to extinguish.
I find this garment—which was apparently regulation in parts of the United States in 1917 and which had analogues in British bathing regulations of the same period—to be among the most precise pieces of evidence I have encountered for how the male body was being managed in this tradition. Not the naked body, which had by then been covered. The body through its covering. The regulatory anxiety, having covered the genitals with fabric, then needed to cover the fabric with more fabric because the fabric was too revealing of the body beneath it. The skirt was the Victorian and Edwardian tradition in material form: the management of the management of the body, the apron over the trunks over the fact.
The English practice of men swimming in the nude was banned in the United Kingdom in 1860, though the process leading to that ban had been underway for some time. In 1737, the Bath Corporation had forbidden nude bathing for males over the age of 10. What I notice in the timeline is the age threshold. Boys under ten could swim without clothes. Boys over ten required covering. The transition was not from childhood to adulthood but from childhood to a specific kind of boyhood—the age at which the male body begins to change was precisely the age at which the regulation commenced. The body developing toward its adult form required management before the adult form had arrived. The covering was not responding to the adult male body. It was anticipating it.
At the beginning of the Victorian period, working people of both sexes bathed for pleasure without clothes. The enforcement of covering was not, initially, universal or consistent. Around 1860–75, under pressure from the church, ever stricter bylaws were passed but not enforced. The laws existed before the enforcement. The enforcement came from the church’s sustained pressure on local authorities.
What this sequence tells me is that the practice—men swimming without clothes—was sufficiently ordinary that the initial laws could be passed without being enforced, and it required an organised institutional campaign to make enforcement happen. Men resisted. Even then, many protested against the drawers and wanted to remain in the nude. The Reverend Francis Kilvert, an English clergyman who was himself a nude swimmer, described the new bathing suits appearing in the 1870s as “a pair of very short red and white striped drawers,” and recorded the older experience with evident feeling: “a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running down naked to the sea.”
A clergyman. Describing freedom. The tradition contains its own counter-evidence.
What I notice in this history is the distinction that the brief draws carefully: the policing of male nudity before the Second World War was primarily about public order and moral decorum rather than sexual protection. Female modesty was framed, at least in part, as protection—protection from the male gaze, from the possibility of assault, from the social consequences of visibility. Male nudity was framed differently.
The exposed male body was not constructed as a body requiring protection. It was constructed as a body posing a threat—to order, to decency, to the regulatory framework of Christian civilisation. The problem was not what would happen to the man if he were seen. The problem was the seeing itself, and what it implied about the man who had permitted himself to be seen.
This is a subtle distinction but I think it is real and it has consequences that I recognise in what I observed over thirty years. The men who came to me were not, primarily, afraid of what would happen to them if their bodies were visible. They were afraid of what the visibility said about them.
The female modesty tradition produced women who feared exposure. The male decorum tradition produced men who were uncertain whether being seen at all was a respectable thing to permit. The hesitation I watched in men undressing was not fear of assault. It was something closer to what I can only call a residual doubt about whether it was proper, for a man of decent character, to be in a room with another person without his clothes.
In 1937, men were legally allowed to swim bare-chested if they so desired, but there was still much controversy surrounding the issue and topless men were often shunned on public beaches. The interwar period produced a partial relaxation, and the partial relaxation is where the question the brief poses becomes most interesting. Why did the male chest become acceptable before total male nudity? What did the chest’s acceptability reveal about what the regulation had actually been managing?
I have been thinking about this for some time. My tentative observation—and I hold it as observation rather than conclusion—is that the chest became acceptable when it stopped being associated with class disorder. The gentleman resisted the bathing costume because he believed contact between salt water and bare skin was medically beneficial, and the costume interfered with that contact.
The working man swam naked in rivers and the sea because he always had and saw no reason to stop. The regulation that enforced covering was partly about morality and partly about the class anxiety that accompanied the expansion of public leisure—the middle classes arriving at the seaside alongside the working classes and finding the working-class practice of unselfconscious nudity incompatible with the decorum they needed the space to maintain.
When the chest was reclassified as acceptable, it became so in the context of sport and athleticism—the tanned, exercised chest of the competitive swimmer, the muscular chest of the young man demonstrating vigour. This was a chest that had been re-encoded as class-appropriate. It was no longer the working man’s unself-conscious exposure. It was the sportsman’s display of cultivated physicality.
What remained unacceptable was what the chest’s acceptability had left behind: the lower body, the genitals, the parts of the anatomy whose exposure could not be given a sporting or athletic frame. The chest, once associated with athletic virtue, was no longer threatening to public order. The rest of the body still was—not because the genitals are inherently threatening, but because no comparable re-encoding had occurred. No athlete’s display of his genitals had acquired the cultural meaning that the bare chest had acquired in the sporting contexts of the 1920s and 1930s. The genitals remained in the category of what could not be given a frame, and what cannot be given a frame must be covered.
The skirt outside the trunks was the logical end-point of this management: a garment that covered the covering, that managed the suggestion, that protected the public from not the body but the idea of the body. When I read about it, I think about the men who arrived at my door carrying the accumulated inheritance of two centuries of this management. They were not wearing external skirts.
But something in the way they offered their bodies—the slight covering gesture, the brief hesitation, the apology for what the body was—was performing the same function. Not the body being hidden. The idea of the body being managed. The awareness that being seen, as a man, in a body, required permission that had not always been granted.
Kilvert’s freedom—the stripping in the open air, the running to the sea—was legislated away in his own lifetime. He watched it happen, the red and white striped drawers appearing on bodies that had previously needed no such management. He noted the loss, as a person who had experienced what came before.
Most of the men who came to me over thirty years had never experienced what came before. They had been formed entirely inside the regulatory framework. They knew no other way of being in a body in the presence of another person. The freedom Kilvert described with such simple directness—what it felt like to strip in the open air—was not something they had a vocabulary for, except perhaps as transgression. The language of transgression is the language of the regulation. Even to imagine the alternative required borrowing the regulation’s own terms.
The external skirt covered the trunks. The trunks covered the body. The body carried the tradition. The tradition is still, in various forms, present.
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