ABSTRACT
As Corbin told us, the beach was always a place where anything goes. Henry James’s actress gave a frisson to the promenaders by turning a somersault off the diving board, and long before that women let their hair down and men took their trousers off in public. A certain respectability reasserted itself when those well-established males of all respect-worthy classes decided what was what in the way of bathing attire and that lasted until the fast set turned up on Bandol beach and its members were observed glistening as they sunbathed, almost naked, ‘the men in nothing more than bathing shorts’.1
