Swimsuit – The Quintessential Clothes Pen

I was heading to a vintage outing this summer and thought there might be enough time upon arrival to visit the beach. I haven’t had a chance to do that in historical clothes recently and for that reason it seemed like an extra exciting opportunity. I pondered breaking out my 1925 green wool jersey swimsuit, but was struck by the inspiration to make a new swimsuit for this occasion instead!

Rather than repeating a similar style and shape as the green suit, I decided on a slightly earlier date for the new suit: 1922. The styles at this point were a little longer, looser, and more like a dress. I thought this would be a nice style for lounging (as opposed to the bathing beauty style of the green suit).

I’d already collected helpful research images when I made the first suit, so I was able to go back to that collection for this project. I settled on a advertisement published by The Stanley W. Blum Co. containing images and descriptions of Bellweather brand Women’s One Piece Bathing Suits with Skirt (below).

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Women’s one-piece bathing suits with skirt” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1922. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/4881a780-c549-012f-9650-58d385a7bc34

Held in the collection of The New York Public Library, this advertisement has a date of April 5, 1922 written in the margins. It includes so much fun information! Prices, colors, fiber content, trimming styles, necklines, armhole shapes… stockings and footwear…

I really enjoy reading about the vibrant colors and interesting (unexpected, I think) color combinations! Turquoise, peacock, and orange are all mentioned separately, but there’s also a suit that combines coral, apple, and purple. What fun to imagine all of these suits in colors rather than in grey scale!

I wanted my suit to be fully from the stash, so that meant looking to see what suitable fabrics I already owned that fit into this vibrant world. In my fabric stash catalog, I found a polyester knit in a juicy red. I had one yard. While not historically accurate in terms of fiber content, it would do and be just the right amount of fabric! Plus, if I actually were to wear it in the water it would dry quickly!

In my inspiration advertisement, scarlet is mentioned multiple times often paired as trimming on a more neutral colored suit, but I decided that I could use creative liberty here given how many vibrant colors are listed as the main color of suits (and given that this fit the bill of being in the stash)!

I didn’t have another exciting color to pair with the red, but I did have some black bits saved from random garments I’d taken apart for other things that I could use as trim. It’s a reverse of the neutral-with-scarlet-as-trim idea! I actually used some of the same recycled garments as I did when I was making a Star Trek dress earlier this year. Below is a photo. I even reused the already hemmed bits from the original garments!

Around this point in the process, as I was thinking about how the black trim was also used on the Star Trek dress, I started wondering if this swimsuit was going to end up looking like a Star Trek / swimsuit mashup… Perhaps a little bit! But I’m hoping that’s only if I mention it!

As you can see in the photo below, I decided on a single band of black trim around the hem of the dress, as well as black bands along the neck and armholes. These ideas all came directly from the advertisement inspiration. Though they are combined from a few different bathing suits on that page, there is a pretty clear inspiration in the suit on the top left.

The “wing sleeves,” as the advertisement calls them, are common though certainly not on every suit from the 1920s. I thought I would give them a try on this suit, partly for the fun of figuring out what pattern shape would create them. To make the pattern I laid out my green swimsuit, added length and circumference, changed the neckline, and added on where the wing sleeves would be. Below is a rough sketch showing the standard armhole and the shape I used for the new swimsuit. This shows the back (abbreviated CB for Center Back). The wing sleeve shape is similar on the front.

Once cut, I basted the pieces together, checked the fit, and tweaked it a few times to get the side seams to sit just right and the wing sleeves to be comfortable but still obviously wing shaped.

For this suit I didn’t want to make built in shorts. Instead, I already owned black bicycle-style shorts with long inseams that worked well with the trim of the suit. They were perfect! You can just see them poking out in some of the photos.

And then I wore it in the surf! On a lovely evening that was wonderfully warm, but not hot. It was a comfortable temperature, a comfortable dress, and the water was even warm (unusual for the part of the Atlantic ocean near me)!

It was a magical evening to go traipsing through the waves!

This swimsuit is my entry for the Historical Sew Monthly theme #8 By The Sea:

The sea has inspired and influenced fashion for millennia. This challenge is all about nautical fashions, whether you make something to wear on the sea, by the sea, in the sea (or lake or river) – or something that would have been transported by sea travel.

Just the facts:

Fabric/Materials: Approximately 1 yard of polyester / spandex knit fabric and scraps of black cotton and polyester / spandex knit fabrics.

Pattern: My own.

Year: 1922.

Notions: Thread.

How historically accurate is it?: 90%. It has the right spirit, a reasonable silhouette, and is in the realm of historically plausible colors. Points off for the fiber content.

Hours to complete: Approximately 8.

First worn: In July, 2026.

Total cost: Approximately $6. The main fabric was only $3 per yard many years ago. The black fabrics were all recycled from old garments.

On my to-do list for this summer was a 1920s bathing suit. At first I thought I might knit one, but I wanted a smaller project than that, and also, a friend who hand knit a swimsuit last year reported a fair bit of sagging happening when she wore hers in the water. So I decided to try a different approach and make my suit from wool jersey fabric, a historically accurate option in terms of weave and fiber for a 1920s suit, as far as I can tell from my research.

After spending lots of time looking at inspirational images on Pinterest and compiling this board of the most inspirational images, I decided on the year 1925, when suits were getting shorter and often sported built in shorts. My main inspiration was this extant suit from 1925 at Abiti Antichi. It’s where my decorative inspiration came from and also justified the visible seam where the shorts attach to the dress. I also referenced this 1920s extant suit at All The Pretty Dresses, which shows interior finishing (serging!) and has narrower straps.

I knew there was no chance of finding wool jersey at a local fabric store, so I searched around the internet for sources. I believe I found only three–a company in New Zealand, New Zealand Merino and Fabrics, that makes gorgeous colors and sells through their own website and through Etsy; Denver Fabrics, which had wool double knit fabric; and Nature’s Fabrics, which I had never ordered from before, but which had lovely colors. I decided on bottle green from Nature’s Fabrics and vowed to get the whole project out of just one yard.

For a pattern, I used a tank top from Old Navy as a starting point since I liked the straps, adding length (and width since my wool jersey was less stretchy than the tank). I cut the dress pieces first, then used the extra bits to cut the shorts.

I wanted to use the pattern from my dotty tap pants for the shorts, but I didn’t have it handy, so I pulled out a finished pair of the shorts and used that instead. Unfortunately, I was a few inches shy of being able to cut all four shorts pieces out of my leftover fabric. My solution was to cut the two fronts out and then piece the back pieces with a seam about 4″ below the waist, hoping that it wouldn’t be noticeable in the finished suit. There’s a slight line, but it’s not something I’m worried about, especially since I basically used up all the fabric I had–no adding to the stash on this project!

The white trim came from the stash. It’s a lightweight knit terrycloth I bought at JoAnn’s when I first started sewing. I made a robe, but didn’t love it. I did, however, keep it and am happy to have repurposed the fabric.

This would have been a really speedy project if it wasn’t for the trim. I used a serger with four threads to sew/finish the seams all at once, making the construction super speedy (I think I cut and assembled the whole thing in an evening). However, the white lines took a long time to carefully machine sew on and then I still had to bind the arm and neck holes, turning the project into a multi-evening size. The time spent was worth it though, because I love the finished product!

I love the images of the bathing suit contests here from the 1920s, in particular this one from 1926. All the bathing beauties are wearing their nice pumps with their bathing suits!

I didn’t have time to get a sash together, but the bathing beauty look is what I was aiming for in this picture, wearing my American Duchess Seaburys with my swimsuit.

My main goal was to have the suit for an event at the end of August, but it was done in time for a vintage beach outing in July! It was an unusually cold day and therefore the beach was pretty empty, but it meant we had the beach basically to ourselves and got some great pictures! In August, I’m planning for the whole suit to get wet, so we’ll see how that goes! In the meantime, here are a few more fun pictures from the July beach day.