The Suit We Weren't Supposed to Wear

I remember the skirted bottoms before I remember much else about summer.

When I was coming up, there was an unspoken rulebook for what a “full-figured” woman was allowed to put on her body at the pool, and it was strict, and it was everywhere — passed down not through any single conversation but through a thousand small ones. A raised eyebrow from an aunt. A saleswoman steering you toward the "slimming" rack before you'd even said what you were looking for. Magazines never bothered to include larger bodies in a pool spread. Don't believe me? I dare you to find anyone over a size 10 in a summer edition of Vogue previous to 2015. The message was consistent.

And if you didn't get the message from the adults, the kids made sure you got it anyway. I can still feel the particular sting of being laughed at poolside — not even by anyone who meant real harm, just kids being kids, which somehow made it worse, because it meant the world had already taught seven- and eight-year-olds what bodies were allowed to be looked at and which ones were a joke. You learn fast, at that age, which kind you are. I learned early. My body was in no man's land of a size 16. I could find swimsuits that would just barely accommodate my big behind, but they were utilitarian and they hurt. The compression was so great that taking them on and off was a huge chore. My stomach and behind pressed into being smaller. Swimming was not fun. I wouldn't succumb to the "skirts" that were available if I'd only wear a size 18. So I ended up sitting out most pool parties and trips to the beach. I sat out more summers than I waded into. I made myself smaller in rooms and smaller at pools, because the two-piece, the cutout, the anything-that-showed-more-than-it-hid — that wasn't for people who looked like me. That was for other women. Smaller women. Women who hadn't been told, over and over, to disappear a little.

What strikes me now, decades later, isn't just how far we've come — it's how quickly, and how recently, it actually happened. Even ten years ago, a woman above a size 16 shopping for a swimsuit was still choosing between "modest" and "invisible." There was no in-between, and there was certainly no sexy. Athletic cuts, structured bras, anything with real support and real shape — that world stopped, size-wise, right around where mine began. Today, that same woman can walk into a store, or scroll a site, and find a two-piece built specifically for her body, sized up to 5X, designed with the same intention and craftsmanship as anything made for a smaller frame. She can find something athletic for actually swimming laps. She can find something unapologetically sexy for actually being looked at. Nobody gasps. Nobody stares. The culture simply isn't shocked anymore by a plus woman in a bikini — and if you didn't live through the before, you might not even register how enormous that shift is. I register it every single day.

So when I designed my first two-piece swimsuit, that's the context I designed this suit inside of. Not in a vacuum, not as a trend — as a direct answer to every skirted bottom I was handed instead of what I actually wanted. This is a midriff-baring, two-piece swimsuit built to solve the actual, specific problems that made suits like this feel risky for bigger bodies in the first place: it doesn't go transparent when it's wet, because nobody should have to think about that at a pool party. It has real bra support built in, because a body like mine needs structure, not just fabric. It's fully lined, so it holds its shape after hours in chlorine and sun instead of stretching out and betraying you by hour three. Every choice in that suit is a direct response to a fear I used to carry into every swimwear season — will this see-through, will this sag, will this hold me the way I need to be held. I built the suit I wish had existed when I was the kid getting laughed at, not the adult who'd finally stopped caring what anyone thought.

Because that's really what this is about, underneath the fabric and the fit. The freedom to wear what you want at the pool has never just been about the pool. It's about whether you're allowed to take up space, unapologetically, in your own body, in public, without shrinking yourself first to make everyone else comfortable. When full-figured women were only offered the skirted bottom, we weren't just being told to cover our stomachs — we were being told to cover ourselves, generally, as a condition of being seen at all. So when a woman today ties on a midriff-baring two-piece and walks to the water without a second thought, she isn't just wearing a swimsuit. She's wearing the same freedom the rest of us had to fight our way into — the freedom to simply be who she is, in daylight, without asking permission first.

That's the suit I made. That's the freedom it's meant to hold.

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