Pamela Anderson's sensational Baywatch swimsuit, and a head-turning collection of 1980s Speedos are among the items set to make a splash at a Design Museum exhibition launching in the spring.
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style is at the west London museum from 28 March-17 August 2025, diving into our passion for swimming — as seen through the lens of design. The show is split into three sections: the pool, the lido and nature, each one exploring how design shapes our relationship with swimming, both in and out of the water.
The show's story begins with the surge of 'proper' swimming in the 1920s and 30s (as opposed to the Victorians' preference for bathing), which brought new styles of swimwear, while also colliding with a major fad for lidos (there's a particular focus on Penzance's Jubilee Pool, which remains the UK's largest seawater pool).
From here, Splash! front-crawls through 100 years of swimming — Olympians, 'mermaids', synchronised swimmers, beach huts, saunas. Among its 200 objects are one of the earliest surviving examples of a bikini, Lucy Morton's gold medal from the 1924 Paris games (Morton was the first British woman to win a solo Olympic title in swimming), the 'technical doping' LZR Racer swimsuit (proven to speed up the race time of pro swimmers but since banned in competitions), and a detailed architectural model of the Zaha Hadid-designed London 2012 Aquatics Centre.
The highlight of the show, though, will surely be the red swimsuit worn by Pamela Anderson in her role as lifeguard CJ Parker in the 1990s American drama Baywatch. Let's hope they're running the opening credits on loop alongside it.
In recent years, of course, things have come full circle, with a glorious revival of lido loving — London now boasts scores of them.
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style, Design Museum, 28 March-17 August 2025
