China sees its first bikini, November 1986

In communist China, women dressed in the androgynous uniform of a nation building a proletarian utopia. Skirts were avoided as a sign of bourgeois decadence; women wore their hair short by law.

Though restrictions loosened after Mao died in 1976, a decade later a crisis broke out over a new threat to communist ideals: the bikini. An international body-building contest to be held in China required female contestants to wear a two-piece swimsuit. One Chinese commentator decried the bikini as “not acceptable to Oriental sensibility”. Another called for police action against the “unhealthy tendency” of wearing swimwear in public.

When the Chinese Communist party finally relented in 1986, the country’s leading intellectual newspaper endorsed the bikini’s debut on its front page as “a challenge to the old traditional thinking” that reflected the Chinese people’s “stronger and stronger desire in recent years for a sense of beauty”. A competition judge added his support: “The women of China, after thousands of years of imbibing traditional feudalistic thinking, are opening their minds.”

That November, thousands of spectators flocked to a stadium in Shenzhen, southern China, to watch the first Chinese women bare their bodies in the name of sport.

Forty years after the bikini was worn at a Paris fashion show, its arrival in China came with a gradual easing of all matters relating to sex or nudity. At the country’s first fine art book fair a month earlier, a collection of classical nude paintings by Titian and other artists, banned during the cultural revolution, had sold out in three days.

As the People’s Republic spun its way into the emancipated future, Chinese women had nothing to lose but their clothes.

definingmoment@ft.com