Brands Getting it Right: Swimsuits for All
- Anthony Najm
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Every year, right around March, the fitness industry, the diet industry, and a surprising number of women's magazines arrive at the same conclusion: summer is coming, and the body is not ready for it. "Get beach body ready" is one of the most durable marketing concepts in fashion, and it does something very specific — it frames whatever body a person currently has as the wrong answer, with a deadline attached. No other fashion season works this way. Nobody panics about getting their body ready for autumn. Swimwear is different, and the industry has known that and used it for a long time.
The consequences are not abstract. People cancel beach trips. People sit fully clothed by the pool in August. People book holidays and spend the whole time in cover-ups. The beach body standard does not just make people feel bad about themselves — it actively stops people from doing things that are good for them, which makes it a more concrete problem than most of the industry has ever had to answer for.
Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue has been running since 1964, and for most of those six decades the body on the cover was remarkable for how consistent it was: thin, toned, and representative of a very narrow slice of actual human bodies. Swimwear brands followed the same blueprint, and many still do. Beach Bunny Swimwear's current collections run from XS to XL, with near-identical bodies modelling every style. The swimsuit comes in the customer's size, but the campaign does not.
Swimsuits for All and the Size Inclusive Swimwear Moment That Changed Sports Illustrated
Swimsuits for All launched in the United States in 2005 with a different premise: that the full range of bodies deserved actual swimwear rather than a polite nod toward extended sizing. Cup sizes run from C to G. The range covers one-pieces, tankinis, bikinis, and swim shorts, with diverse bodies shown across all of them as the default rather than collected into a separate plus-size section at the bottom of the page.
The moment that defined the brand came in 2013 with a fatkini collection, developed in partnership with blogger Gabi Gregg — the name chosen deliberately and without apology. The point was straightforward: plus-size women wearing bikinis is not a statement or a campaign theme. It is swimwear. Two years later, the brand's #CurvesinBikinis campaign became the first plus-size advertisement to run in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue — inside the same publication that had been setting the standard for fifty years. Ashley Graham followed with a full collection partnership in 2016. Each of these moves targeted exactly the spaces where the beach body standard had been most consistently reinforced, which is why each one cut through in the way it did.
The campaigns use unretouched photography throughout. In a category where aspirational has always meant digitally corrected, that is a deliberate choice: the body in the image is the body, and the whole campaign is built around that being the point rather than a limitation.
Size Inclusive Swimwear and the End of the Beach Body Audit
The beach body concept is the most expensive lie the swimwear industry ever sold. Summer is not a reward for a certain kind of body, and the beach is not a venue with a cover charge. For a lot of people, decades of narrow imagery and seasonal deadline marketing have made it feel exactly like that — and the result is ordinary summer activities quietly written off because the industry decided the water had a dress code.
Swimsuits for All does not undo that cultural pressure single-handedly. What it does is remove the part it is responsible for. The imagery treats a full range of bodies as the expected customer rather than the bonus round, and that changes who looks at the catalogue and thinks the summer is for them.
Index:MH sets measurable standards for how the beauty and fashion industry affects consumer mental health. To find out more or to nominate a brand that's getting it right, visit indexmh.org.
