Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style: From Pamela Anderson's famous one-piece to Tom Daley's tiny Speedos

Telegraph

27-03-2025

The star exhibit of the Design Museum 's new show Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style is Pamela Anderson 's iconic flaming-red swimsuit from her Baywatch days. But bereft of her big bouncing bosoms, this tiny lycra number, suspended from two wires behind a glass case in the basement of the museum, feels a bit deflated. The only bits of the display faithful to the original are two prosthetic and very pert nipples nestled within the folds of the fabric and seemingly in the wrong place by about an inch.
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style intends to celebrate 'our enduring love of the water over the last 100 years' by showcasing swimming's evolution in its social, cultural, technological and environmental contexts. The exhibition is divided thematically, with each of the three main spaces of the museum's basement dedicated to one of the three major swimming arenas: pools, lidos, and nature. While the carefully thought-out 1950s retro pop ambience initially comes across as vibrant, an imminent sensation of drowning takes hold as one dives deeper into this subterranean hoarder's paradise of any and all swimming-related paraphernalia.
At best it is a 'fun' exhibition (not necessarily a bad thing) which ping-pongs the viewer's attention between an abundance of trinkets, advertisements, magazines, posters, goggles, rubber pool slides, costume sketches, swimming pool designs and rather unsightly swimming costumes covering the expanse of modern swimming history.
As with all decent British museums these days, a sociopolitical angle has not been neglected, even for this seemingly benign activity. Playing on a loop in the first room is a video about The Subversive Sirens, who define themselves as 'a Minnesota-based synchronised swimming team committed to black liberation, equity in swimming/aquatic arts, radical body acceptance, and queer visibility' and won a joint gold medal for their free combo routine at the Gay Games in 2018. The video of their practice includes members of the team talking about what they enjoy about synchronised swimming: 'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. We're not gonna wait for the world to be, like this perfect 'da da da da da' to start living free now.'
While there are some engaging artefacts in this first room – the first Olympic solo swimming gold medal won by a British woman, Lucy Morton at the Paris Olympics in 1924; the microscopic Speedos worn by Tom Daley at the Tokyo Olympics, where he won gold in 2021 – it was quite difficult to concentrate over the omnipresent sound of the liberation of swimming being played in a running loop. 'One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight' go The Subversive Sirens as they practice their neverending underwater routine. How tiring it must be for them to be trapped underwater in the basement of the Design Museum in perpetuity.
The Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style exhibition is certainly a spectacle and will be especially worthwhile for those who are swimming enthusiasts, nostalgic for the lido age, or curious about the sociopolitical importance of swimming since the 1920s. Come for the refreshing aquatic levity and stay for the Facekini, Monokini (topless bikini), and a silver swimming thong; if this is the way modern swimming is headed, then let's bring back the bathing machines, none of which are on display. This is a good opportunity for viewers to dip their toes into the nourishing waters of swimming sub-culture; without any risk of verrucas.