Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style: full of 'revelations and surprises'

A visitor looks at Mária Švarbová's photograph of identical synchronised swimmers making the same repeated shape on a poolside — A visitor looking at 'Movement', 2020, by Mária Švarbová at a preview of Splash!

(Image credit: Stephen Chung/Alamy)

In July 1946, US forces detonated a nuclear bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. Four days later, a French fashion designer called Louis Réard "launched a provocative two-piece swimsuit at a poolside party in Paris". Réard wanted to give his design a name that "would embody the tiniest garment imaginable, combined with the most explosive impact possible", and saw the "almighty atomic blast as the ideal symbol"; and so was born the modern bikini.

This bizarre tale is just one of many related in this exhibition charting our love affair with swimming over the past century, said Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. The show explores its subject "across fashion, architecture, sport and more", touching on everything from Britain's "love of lidos" and "the lure of the seaside", to the resurgent popularity of wild swimming and even mermaid-themed TikTok trends. Featuring a fascinating selection of swimwear, photographs, films and all manner of archival material, it adds up to an "illuminating" and enjoyable event.

There's no shortage of "spectacle" here, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. The layout "ping-pongs the viewer's attention" from exhibit to exhibit, taking in "an abundance of trinkets, advertisements, magazines, posters, goggles, rubber pool slides, costume sketches, swimming pool designs and rather unsightly swimming costumes". Some are genuinely absorbing: there's the first Olympic gold medal for swimming ever won by a British woman, Lucy Morton, at the Paris Games in 1924; Tom Daley's "microscopic" Speedos; and even the "iconic flaming red swimsuit" Pamela Anderson sported on Baywatch. As ever, with museum shows in Britain, you must expect a certain amount of progressive politics: a video about The Subversive Sirens, an American synchronised swimming team committed to black liberation and "queer visibility", plays loudly across much of the show. But whether you're curious about the "sociopolitical importance of swimming since the 1920s", or you just like old lidos and swimwear, it's well worth a visit.

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The show's broad sweep means that its exploration of certain big subjects "can be (forgive me) shallow", said Rowan Moore in The Observer. Nor do the dozens of "briefs and bikinis" on show make for the "most compelling" of exhibits. Still, there are some fascinating things here: a video about the women of Jeju in South Korea who have dived for seafood and seaweed for centuries; "gay soft porn" magazine spreads "masquerading as features about swimwear at a time when homosexuality was illegal"; a model of Zaha Hadid's aquatics centre for the London 2012 Olympics. It may not be the most intellectually rigorous of exhibitions, but it amounts to "an engaging array of things to do with swimming", which offers many "revelations and surprises".