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Eubank, 2005). The popularity of this shorts/skirt construction prevailed with American women
into the late 1950s when bikini bottoms started to take on more of an underwear silhouette. As
the upper thigh area became more exposed, women were forced to take notice of their body hair
and had to make the decision of either leaving the hair to public view or depilating it. By the end
of the decade Rudi Gernreich was designing risqué bathing suits and America had finally
adopted Jacques Heim‟s much smaller two-piece known as the bikini. This shift in popularity
for a smaller bathing-suit silhouette further increased the possibility of exposed pubic hair.
Glamour magazine‟s December 1975 issue declared “exposed body hair” the “most neglected
problem of bikini wearers,” pushing women to depilate the “upper inner thigh” region even
further. Also in 1975, Gernreich introduced the thong, a silhouette that completely exposed the
buttocks. Wearers of this style not only have to think about pubic hair exposure in the front of
the bottom, but are forced to consider any anal hair that might be exposed in the back. The
1980s embraced a new bathing silhouette, the “high- thigh cut,” which looks similar to an
inverted V and exposes the hip area all the way to the waistline (Tortora & Eubank, 2005). Once
again, as the sides of bathing suit bottoms narrowed, unexposed pubic hair also had to narrow
(Morris, 2004). Inspired by this new and very different silhouette, designers created several
other bathing suit types in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the slingshot and g-string
bikinis. Considered a very controversial bathing suit at the time was Gernreich‟s “pubikini,”
which came out in 1985 (Pubikini, n.d.). The fabric of the pubikini was purposefully see-
through so that wearers could show off their pubic hair.
The silhouette of bathing suits and negligee changed, and with new technologies so did
the fabric. Into the 1960s, it was typical for a bathing suit to be cotton and most often lined. The
synthetic or artificial fibers, which began to appear in the 1960s, generally had properties that
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