She Changed What Women Could Swim In. The Famous Story Is Wrong.

Annette Kellerman was an Australian champion swimmer who swam the Thames for a newspaper, tried to swim the English Channel at least three times, performed underwater ballet in a glass tank on three continents, and sold one-piece bathing suits under her own name for the better part of twenty-five years. By the 1910s, "an Annette Kellerman" was a name for that style of swimsuit. She is remembered instead for being arrested on a Boston beach in 1907 for wearing one. That story is repeated by encyclopaedias, museums and halls of fame, and nobody has found a contemporary record of it. The earliest versions I have found are newspaper pieces from the early 1950s, and the main one is her own recollection. This episode covers what women actually wore into the water before her, how stockings came to be sewn into a racing suit for a royal audience, the Harvard doctor whose careful remark that she was near the ideal figure became a headline about the perfect woman, the lost million-dollar film she may or may not have appeared nude in, and the two surviving swimsuits in Australian museum collections that tell the real story. ------------- Find our Podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or where ever you listen to your podcasts. ------------- Watch our other videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM3OqLHVo6eGkl86dsCJlWdQg9UNuNoWm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM3OqLHVo6eH5hSfUOdjVzGLZxfJOKbeG -------------- 💬 Which fashion icon should we explore next? Let me