Commentators credit everyone from Rihanna to the contestants on television’s Love Island with the resurgent popularity of the thong bikini, but somehow – and in hindsight this seems an oversight – I’d missed the memo.
The last time I witnessed this much naked bottom was circa 1979 when my parents shifted from suburban Marlborough to a stretch of the West Coast where people grew their own wheatgerm and read the Whole Earth Catalogue. Nobody shaved their armpits and underpants were frequently optional.
The difference between then and now is approximately 20 million square kilometres of ozone depletion, higher awareness of the perils of sun exposure and the ever-increasing power of that sun to superheat our summers.
Safety first, I thought as I watched the beach bums of Raglan lower themselves to the sand.
It wasn’t just the finely-grained nature of, well, nature. Earth’s deteriorating geology will infiltrate any available nook and cranny but if you go to the beach then presumably you are expecting sand between something.
My concerns were about temperature, not texture.
If a thong bikini is “fire” or “hot” or whatever other word we’re currently co-opting to mean legally naked, then, in the context of a volcanic beach, it is also dangerous.
En route to the ocean, I had lost a jandal and burned an instep. In summer, Raglan’s black sands turn thermonucleic. There are warning signs urging dog walkers to protect their pup’s paws, but the scantily clad pay scant regard.
Togs, togs, third degree burns.
When I told an editor I was thinking about filing a column on the world’s tiniest swimwear, she replied: “My son is home from university with his girlfriend. When I’m sorting the washing I have to be careful not to mistake her thongs for a bit of lint that’s got caught up.”
I tried, and failed, to imagine a world where I would expect my boyfriend’s mother to wash my underwear but that’s a whole 600 other words. The thong bikini is, of course, just the beach-adjacent version of the G-string, which is also and absolutely having a moment.
Here, I think, the world falls into two camps: people who swear G-strings are the most comfortable thing they’ve worn in their life and people who don’t lie.
I will not hear a prudish word against anybody’s right to bare arms, legs and buttocks. I am ecstatic at the role the thong might play in the potential demise of society’s tyrannical and damaging “does my bum look big in this” narrative. But nothing will convince me to wear a permanent wedgie.
Recently, I read an argument for the thong as a garment that provides a “universally flattering fit” because the thing with the thong is that it’s barely there. Apparently, this absence of visible fabric invites the eye to travel. It makes the legs look longer, the bum more lifted and the waist more curvy.
I have read this story before. It is called The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.
