There are plenty of places where no one would bat an eyelid at the sight of a thong bikini; on a beach in Brazil or around the Love Island fire pit, visible butt cheeks are practically de rigueur. But my first sighting this year was not while surfing in Australia or sunbathing in the Caribbean, but at an open-water swimming spot, on a rainy day in Scotland.
I should not have been surprised. Tiny swimwear is huge news this summer. It is no longer confined to sunny climes, but cropping up everywhere from lidos to leisure centres – and lochs, apparently.
The trickle down from catwalks and influencers to holidaymakers and shoppers is notable. A search for “thong bikini” on Asos yields 187 results, ranging from high-leg styles, to side-tie, to tanga (somewhere between a thong and a standard brief), while high-street outlets including H&M, Calzedonia and Zara all have thong bikini bottoms in their collections. And, as with any trend, there are plenty of celebrity forerunners, including gymnast Simone Bilesmodel Heidi Klumactor Sofia Vergara and singer Nicole Scherzinger. Rapper Lizzo is a longtime fan.
“I won’t lie, it was nerve-racking initially,” says Victoria, 29, who wore a thong bikini for the first time on a recent solo trip to Naples. As for many new converts, part of the appeal lay in the fact that she would be able to avoid the significant tan lines created by fuller coverage swimwear. “I saw thong bikinis everywhere and wished I could wear one. But then I thought about it and was like, it’s just a bum. Men wear those teeny-tiny trunks where you see everything, so why can’t I wear this? Plus, it was really comfy.”
The itsy-bitsy bikini revolution may have come to the fore this summer, but it has been rumbling for some time. In 2023, the New York Times declared that “more women are adopting the ‘less is more’ philosophy” when it comes to beachwear; the same year, fashion site Who What Wear called thong bikinis the “controversial swimwear trend you’ll see on every beach this summer”. In 2024, New Zealand site The Spinoff asked: “Why is every bikini bottom a thong now?”
“I think we’ve moved into another age of body consciousness – a much more expressive moment,” says Shaun Cole, associate professor in fashion at the University of Southampton. “People are saying: ‘It’s my body and I can show it off in ways that I choose to, and if that involves wearing clothing that is sometimes deemed socially unacceptable then I’m going to do that.’”
Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be “flattering” – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely.
“Women of all shapes and sizes are leaning into bolder cuts with real confidence as part of a wider cultural shift towards body positivity and self-expression, which is great to see,” says Aliya Wilkinson, founder of luxury swimwear label Ôsalé. Her brand doesn’t yet offer thong styles, but she plans to introduce them in the future.
“In the west, fashion has long found ways to augment the butt, to make it look bigger and put emphasis on this part of the female body,” says Roberta Sassatelli, professor of sociology at the University of Bologna and co-author of Body and Gender. “This is perhaps because the butt is deemed to be very sensual but is not related to reproduction. Because it is totally related to pleasure, it feels more liberated.”
The trend is reflected in the popularity of potentially dangerous cosmetic procedures, such as Brazilian butt lifts. Sculpting the perfect behind has also become something of a fitness obsession. In 2018, sports writer Anna Kessel noted that “the emphasis on a firm, or ‘juicy’, bottom has now overtaken the flat stomach as the fitness holy grail in mainstream women’s health magazines”, with an increasing number of gym classes dedicated exclusively to the posterior. Seven years later, could it be that gym-goers are keen to display the results?
“I think the popularity of thong bikinis exists at the convergence of a focus on building glutes in the gym, a kind of exhibitionist creep in which the butt is one of the last frontiers that had remained mostly covered in public, and a greater cultural acceptance of a range of different body types,” says historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation. “The low-slung jeans of the early 2000s were certainly correlated with the age when flat abs workouts were all the rage.”
Cole suggests there may be another reason why more people are choosing to wear less. “It could be linked to what’s been called the ‘pornification’ of culture and style,” he says, citing an idea put forward by fashion historian Pamela Church Gibson. “(It is) modelled on a style that has come out of pornography – at the points where pornography stars are dressed – which involves garments such as tiny bikinis or thong-style underwear. There’s an acceptance of that style without people really realising where it originated. The popularity of shows such as Love Island, where people are there to show off their bodies as a way of attracting a partner, again ties to that pornification of style.”
After years of falling audience figures, Love Island is also experiencing a boom this summer: increased numbers tuned in to watch the UK and US versionswith the New York Times attributing the popularity of the latter to its ability to offer reprieve during “times of societal and economic hardship”.
As dress and design historian Amber Butchart put it when curating Splash!, a recent exhibition on swimming and style at the Design Museum in London: “Swimwear’s close relationship with the body means it reflects changing attitudes to modesty, morality and public display. From the 18th century, bathing machines were used to protect sea dippers from prying eyes. But throughout the 20th century, a number of boundary-pushing designs challenged previous ideas of decency while also courting controversy. For the last century, what we wear while swimming has been used as an excuse to police bodies.”
While it is predominantly women who are opting for poolside thongs today, this wasn’t always the case. The earliest iteration of the style is thought to be the ancient loinclothworn by men. Modern thongs are said to have been adopted in 1939, when the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, ordered that showgirls must cover themselves rather than perform nude at the city’s World’s Fair. When it comes to swimwear specifically, Austrian-American Rudi Gernreich – the fashion designer behind the monokini, or “topless bikini” – is most often credited with creating the thong bikini, in response to Los Angeles city council banning public nudity, including naked sunbathing, in 1974.
The thong bikini has prompted similar bans more recently. In January, a council in Greater Sydney, Australia, banned thong and (even skimpier) G-string bikinis at its public pools. A number of women have also been arrested for wearing thong bikinis in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the style is banned. In the UK, Greenwich Leisure Ltd, which operates 240 leisure centres under the brand Better, requires swimmers to wear “full-coverage bikinis”, which a spokesperson previously indicated did imply “that thongs wouldn’t be acceptable”.
But even when thong styles are not prohibited, many bikini-wearers remain nervous. “I do own one, but it’s only been worn once, when my partner and I had a private villa in Portugal,” says Rebecca, 33. Even then, she says, she felt a little too exposed. “I don’t understand why someone would wear one on a family holiday, for example. Thong bikinis feel quite sexualised, so to me it seems inappropriate. Give me high-waisted bikini bottoms that cover your cheeks any day.”
For Sassatelli, the reason thong bikinis are in vogue is not so surprising. “The thong has never gone away completely,” she says. “But for people who are in their teens and 20s, they haven’t really been ‘in fashion’. Once (the fashion industry) has forgotten something, then it can be recuperated – and it makes for a little sense of novelty.”
