Stay cool, Los Angeles – like the people above in a 1920s-era photo from the Los Angeles Municipal Plunge.

Wherever you go to cool off, you’re unlikely to encounter the swimsuits of the 1920s. The Times reported in July 1920 about a rule requiring women’s swimsuits to have skirts – and not gauzy or see-through skirts neither!

From an article headlined What Ho! Put Skirts on Bathers:

Oh, you film bathing beauties! Likewise, a what ho! or two for the Venice mermaids, also what to tell! This is to warn you that if you would a-bathing go at any of the municipal swimming pools you must leave your gay and abbreviated bathing suits at home, for the Playground Commission, with the Council’s connivance, has issued a Puritan pool edict.

In other words, if you, this is only for feminine ears, would swim anywhere within the purlieus of Los Angeles you must hide your charms with a skirt that isn’t diaphanous.

…

“Oh, yes,” said Supt. Raitt of the Department of Playgrounds, yesterday, “we are turning back young women who would bathe in the city pools in suits that – ah, ahem – we, you know – suits that would be all right perhaps at Venice or Atlantic City but – well, we cannot permit them.”

Read the rest of The Times’ story about the “Puritan pool edict.”

– Matt Ballinger

Photo: Bathers at Los Angeles public swimming pool the Municipal Plunge, circa 1920. Credit: Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library