Figure 9.—Bathing hat of natural color and purple straw, c. 1880. (Smithsonian photo P-65409.)
Nevertheless, Homer’s sketch reflects characteristics seen in certain surviving examples from the 1860s—namely that the top was becoming more fitted, being attached completely to a belt with the fuller skirt pleated or gathered to the bottom edge of the belt. In the Design Laboratory Collection of the Brooklyn Museum there is an 1860 black poplin specimen that may be a bathing dress. This example is trimmed at the shoulder seam with epaulets, an example of the extent to which fashion was finally playing a part in bathing costume.[39]
The dresses described above appear peculiar not only to 20th century eyes, but they also seem to have amused mid-19th century correspondents. One writer in 1857 declared that,
We don’t think a man could identify his own wife when she comes out of the bathing-house. A plump figure enters, surrounded with a multitude of rustly flounces and scarcely able to squeeze an enormous hoop through the door. She is absent a few minutes, and presto change! out comes a tall lank apparition, wrapped in the scanty folds of something that looks more like a superannuated night-gown than anything else, and a battered straw-chapeau knocked down over the eyes, and stalks down towards the beach with the air and gait of a Tartar chieftain![40] [[fig. 10].]
Figure 10.—“How she went in,” from Harper’s Bazar, August 1870. (Smithsonian photo 61585A.)
Another writer felt that he
... must say—even in the columns of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated—that they don’t look very picturesque or pretty when a la Naiade.... Rather limp, sacks tied in the middle, eel-bottles, hydropathic coalheavers and “longshoremen,” and preternaturally dilapidated Bloomers, would appear to be the ideals aimed at.[41] [[fig. 11].]