France's highest administrative court has suspended a resort town's burkini ban, saying it is a "serious and manifestly illegal infringement of fundamental liberties".
The legal challenge was brought about by the Human Rights League (LDH) and overturns a lower court's decision that the ban was acceptable in the interest of maintaining public order.
The suspension is temporary, with a fuller legal judgement to follow.
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Although the challenge was made relating to a ban in the Riviera town of Villeneuve-sur-Loubet, the ruling will set a nationwide legal precedent, the Daily Telegraph reports the LDH's lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, as saying.
The decision of 30 French towns to ban the full-length swimsuit, which features a head-covering designed for Muslim women, from public beaches in the past week has ignited a fierce debate about the right of the government to dictate religious expression.
Villeneuve-sur-Loubet's decision not to allow burkinis followed a violent clash on a beach in Sisco, Corsica, where police broke up a fight between men of North African descent and tourists apparently taking photographs of women in the swimwear.
The mayor of Cannes, meanwhile, prohibited the wearing of outfit on the grounds of preserving "good morals and secularism", setting off a domino effect across the country.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls and opposition leader Nicholas Sarkozy have both voiced their support for the bans, along with some sections of the press.
In scenes reminiscent of the media storm following the government's ban on the wearing of face-covering burkas in public, commentators have argued back and forth about the justification of a prohibition.
Jean-Michel Servant in Midi-Libre said the burkini was an "affront to human dignity" and had no place in the "country of Chanel and Brigitte Bardot".
With the country still reeling from a string of deadly Islamist terror attacks, an "ostentatious religious symbol" is a "provocation" to France's secular culture, he added.
But some commentators fear that fanning the flames of factionalism will do more harm than good.
Legislating religious expression was playing into Islamic State's hands, wrote Olivier Berger in La voix du nord.
The Islamic dress itself might be "archaic and contrary to women's emancipation", he continues, but "even so, one should have to right to bathe on French beaches freely, in the outfit of their choice".
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