“For as long as women have gone to the beach to try to enjoy themselves, it seems, people have followed them there to pester them about their clothes.”

- Selina Cheng, Quartz, Aug 24, 2016

COMMENT Revolutions are often sparked by folly-driven ideas about regulating human behaviour. Banning the worship of symbols renders them more sacred than not; prohibiting certain items that would otherwise be embraced with general enthusiasm adds unintended zest.

Women have never been allowed much truck when it comes to fashion, even in areas of life where relaxation has been assumed. The beach as place of relaxation became, in time, a place of police and religious control. Sand, the sea, and titillation; permitting women a certain freedom of wear was all too much.

Those in the United States of the pre-First World War era, for instance, faced the ubiquitous tape measurer and expulsion for revealing too much leg, and much else besides.