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In its nineties heyday, more than one billion people watched Baywatch each week. Many of these viewers tuned in to marvel at a red swimsuit struggling to contain Pamela Anderson as she ran along a beach in slow motion.
London’s Design Museum is hoping people will want to look at said swimsuit without Anderson threatening to pop out of it like a chestburster from the Alien movies. The museum is displaying the swimwear item as part of an exhibition dedicated to swimming and people’s love of water. “Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style” runs from March 28 to August 17, 2025.
The show will delve into swimming’s evolution over the past century in three locations: the pool, the lido, and nature. “The exhibition’s story will begin in the 1920s, when swimwear began to be marketed for swimming rather than the Victorian’s preference for bathing, and when beach holidays exploded in popularity,” the Design Museum said in a statement. “It will explore right up to the present day, and swimming’s role in modern life such as how it influences and subverts our ideas of body autonomy and agency, as well as its link to environmental issues.”
More than 200 objects will map swimming’s evolution in its social, cultural, technological, and environmental contexts. The first Olympic gold medal won by a British swimmer, ten pairs of men’s Speedos from the 1980s, and the banned “technical doping” LZR Racer swimsuit will be included.
An architectural model of the Zara Hadid-designed 2012 Aquatics Center in London and one of the earliest surviving examples of a two-piece swimsuit, first coined a bikini in 1946, will also be on show. That year, French designer Louis Réard released his creation in Paris – it was named after a coral reef in the Marshall Islands called Bikini Atoll, where the US tested nukes.
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“It’s incredible to be showing Pamela Anderson’s iconic Baywatch swimsuit in the exhibition, especially at this pivotal point when she has reclaimed her own image, and has designed and modelled her own swimwear,” dress and design historian Amber Butchart, who co-curated “Splash,” said.
“[The history of swimwear is interesting because] it mirrors wider changes in society over the past century, whether that’s around issues of bodily autonomy and agency, or how we spend our leisure time,” she added.
