JAUNDICED EYE

A modest Aussie cozzie causes a French kerfuffle

France normally comes to a virtual standstill during the long summer months, as everyone who is able exits the stifling cities and heads for the coast. This year, however, there was no seaside idyll.

Instead there’s been bitterness and division, with a dividing line scratched into the beach sand between opposing forces. At times the enmity turned violent. In one incident, hundreds of men laid into one another in a pitched battle on a Corsican beach, leaving four of them hospitalised.

And the reason? A novel beachwear called the burkini. That’s a portmanteau neologism for a new kind of swimming costume for women, cobbled from burka — the head-to-toe Islamic dress — and bikini — of “itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot” fame.

Unlike the burka, which is banned in France because it hides the identity of the wearer, the burkini exposes the face, hands and feet. It looks somewhat like a body-hugging wetsuit with a nifty built-in hood. 

Religious Muslim women have embraced the burkini as a way to go swimming while still adhering to their faith’s strict modesty edicts. It is, however, also worn by secular western women who are sensitive to the sun or have body issues. 

But the burkini, French officials warn, is far more than just a convenient item of apparel. It is a powerful political weapon, as well as a way of enslaving women.

It is inimical to public order, they declare, because it ignites violent passions in any who gaze upon it. It is subversive in that it undermines the secular guarantees of the constitution, which forbid the ostentatious display in public of religious symbols. 

So the burkini must be suppressed lest the French Republic implodes and this summer a number of cities tried to do just that, banning the offensive cozzie from beaches and public swimming pools. Offenders were fined and sent packing to the accompaniment of hisses and boos from their fellow citizens who, according to the polls, support the ban by a margin of two to one.

On at least one occasion paramilitary officers, wearing bulletproof vests and toting firearms and truncheons, were deployed. Their dangerous target? A burkini-clad mum who had been playing in the waves with her kids, and who was forced to disrobe on the spot. 

A court decreed that a ban was “necessary, appropriate and proportionate” in order to ensure public order. The prohibition has since been overturned in one jurisdiction but that has not dampened public enthusiasm for total prohibition, with enabling legislation likely to be tabled.

Prime Minister Manuel Vallis describes the burkini as an Islamic “affirmation of political activism … aimed at subjugating women”. In other words the burkini is being worn not because of religious modesty and convenience but as a political up-yours by Muslim women who are too downtrodden even to be aware their slavery.

This will no doubt come as a surprise to the apolitical Australian fashion designer who invented it. And it is a view that would doubtless amuse the Frenchman who caused the previous Gallic fashion controversy when he invented the bikini in 1957.

At the time, he eloquently defined the parameters of a bikini’s flimsiness by declaring that it should not comprise more fabric than could effortlessly be drawn through a ring. A scandalised Parisian critic described it as being two pieces of cloth so small that they revealed everything about its wearer except her maiden name. 

The bikini was considered so outré that even in libertine France not a single fashion model could be found to wear it at the launch. The designer had to hire a prostitute.

It was inimical to public order, declared the establishment of the day, because it ignited violent, licentious passions in any who gazed upon it. Nothing good would come of it and it should be banned forthwith. 

The bikini — as with the miniskirt that followed it a few years later — was a satanic invention that would surely arouse the displeasure of a disapproving God. Here, on the southern tip of Africa, it was blamed for everything that went wrong, from drought to Springbok rugby defeats.

But fortunately French pragmatism prevailed and within a year the bikini had swept all before it. It was the end of the voluminous, all encompassing burka-like swimming apparel that women of the 1950s were expected to wear to protect their modesty.

History goes in cycles. Let’s hope that pragmatism triumphs again and the French state steps back. Women — so long as they actually do have freedom to decide — are best left to choose for themselves what they wear.

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