If the bathing suits had been of the old-style no objection to this
would have been made. The woman's bathing suit of the olden days were
a cumbrous swaddling garment, high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted,
bloomer-breeched and stockinged.
Simultaneously with the outbreak of the street parade era, above noted,
there came with spontaneous-combustion-like rapidity, a radical change
in the style of female bathing suits "on the street at Waikiki."
First the sleeves, then the stockings, then the skirts, then the main
portion of the garment covering the legs, successively disappeared,
until the low-necked, sleeveless, legless one-piece suit became "the
thing"; and women clad in garments scantier than the scantiest on the
ballet stage, were parading Kalakaua avenue in the vicinity of the Moana
hotel, to the scandal and disgust of some; the devouring gaze of others;
and the interested inspection of whomsoever chose to inspect!
It was a startling sight to the uninitiated--probably unduplicated in
any other civilized country.
The South Pacific or the heart of Africa would probably have to be
visited to find virtuous women so scantily clad, making such exhibition
of their persons in public-more particularly on the public streets.
This scantiness of dress became the subject of protest, of
justification, of discussion in press, in public and in private
throughout the community.
The practice was violently attacked as tending to lewdness and scandal;
as vigorously defended as a question of personal taste and liberty, and
as a matter concerning safety and comfort in swimming.
Those "old-style suits" he refers to, "full-skirted, bloomer-breeched"
were the godly ones brought to Hawaii by the censors, but which
gradually disappeared with the influx of rich tourists from America,
and the importation by Honolulu merchants of the flimsier and less
concealing kind. This new generation of whites that has sought escape
from the "cumbrous, swaddling garment" embraces the flapper, who at
Waikiki is a beautiful and wholesome sight. Browned by years of exposure
to the beach sun, charmingly modelled, and with the grace and freedom of
limb of the surf-board rider and canoeist, she has no consciousness of
guilt in her emergence dripping from the sea, in her lying in the breeze
upon the sand, nor in her walks to and from her bungalow nearby. And she
refuses to be censored.
The commentator, proprietor of the oldest newspaper in the islands, and
himself a noted diplomat, lawyer and revolutionist--he took up a rifle
against Liliuokalani--says so:--
The law has been observed by a few, ignored by a few, and caricatured by
the many. It is not an uncommon thing to see a woman walking the streets
in Waikiki in the scantiest of bathing suits, with drapery of the
flimsiest suspended from her shoulders and floating behind upon the
breeze.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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