Beachgoers sport swimwear styles of the time at Daytona Beach in 1909. (Florida State Archives)

This month marks 76 years since the birth of the bikini in 1946, but less than 40 years earlier, such a getup seemed as unlikely on Central Florida’s beaches as rocket ships blasting into space from Cape Canaveral.

Bathing costumes got their start in the United States in the mid-1800s, when railroads made seaside resorts more accessible to vacationers. According to the mores of the day, swimming was a more acceptable pastime for men than for women, but by the early 1900s that had changed considerably.

Images of folks at Daytona Beach in 1909 show smiling sunbathers covered from ankle to elbow. Women who have braved the surf wear dark leggings, shoes and hats with their formidable costumes, designed more for just getting wet than for real, athletic swimming.

Just two years earlier, in 1907, the first woman to swim across the English Channel, Australian athlete Annette Kellerman, had been arrested in Boston for wearing a one-piece suit that looked a little like what a modest yoga practitioner might wear today.

By 1913, the Portland Knitting Co. (later Jantzen Swimwear) produced a rib-knit wool suit for the Portland Rowing Club that showed an evolution toward the modern bathing suit. Although well suited for the cool Oregon weather, it weighed 8 pounds when wet and probably tended to slip off.

Soon the company made improvements, added women’s suits and hired husband-and-wife artists Frank and Florenz Clark to craft an advertising campaign. Inspired by women divers training in Portland for the 1920 Olympics, the Clarks came up with a future icon in advertising and in Daytona Beach: the Red Diving Girl.

The Jantzen Red Diving Girl, at least 16 feet long, perched for decades at 8 N. Ocean Ave. in Daytona Beach, as pictured here. It’s now at One Daytona on International Speedway Boulevard. (Joy Wallace Dickinson)

Clad in a saucy suit resembling a long tank top, the Diving Girl appeared on billboards and ads and became something of a craze. In 1922, Jantzen printed 10,000 Red Diving Girl stickers that were distributed in store displays. People grabbed them up to paste on the windshields of their cars.

The Diving Girl was still going strong for Jantzen in 1959, when a Los Angeles mannequin company transformed the image, now wearing a strapless one-piece, into several fiberglass versions to be used on signs. In the 1960s, one came to Daytona Beach, where it remained at 8 N. Ocean Ave., above Stamie’s Smart Beachwear, until the shop closed in 2018.

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Then, suddenly the statue was gone, on her way west, according to news reports. Daytona Beach wanted her back, and later that year, thanks to a public effort, the Red Diving Girl soars in a new place at the One Daytona complex on International Speedway Boulevard.

The Red Diving Girl wears a bathing cap, once seen as essential as a bathing dress for cutting a fashionable figure on the beach. In 1909 at Daytona Beach, women bathers were pictured sporting puffy headgear resembling shower caps.

By the 1920s, such hats had given way to latex rubber caps with “aviator” chin straps, at least for people who were actually swimming. When rubber became scarce during World War II (because it was needed for war materials), rubber swim caps disappeared, but they bounced back in the 1950s with fancy designs shaped by fashion.

Made of pastel-colored latex fashioned into flower petals, futuristic spikes, and other designs, these caps framed the face more like a stylish cloche than a part of an athlete’s equipment. If a swimmer dove underwater, this kind of cap didn’t do much to keep out moisture, but if she kept her head above water, it might protect her pin-curled locks from a well-aimed splash.

Women wearing hats, scarves and holding parasols enjoy the sunshine at Daytona Beach in 1909. (Florida State Archives)

The regulations at many 1950s swimming pools called for caps for women at the time, apparently in an effort to keep longer hair and hair spray out of the water. But the popularity of longer hairstyles for men in the late 1960s and ‘70s — and the arrival of more natural hairstyles for women — gradually inspired many pools to drop their cap-only requirements, and the glamorous, flower-power bathing cap floated into the past.

The bikini is still with us. Apparently, fourth-century Roman artwork suggests that some women athletes wore a scanty two-piece sports costume, but the modern bikini dates from July 1946, when French engineer Louis Réard introduced his shocking swimsuit design at a popular Paris swimming pool.

An engineer who was managing his mother’s Paris lingerie shop at the time, Réard named what he heralded as “the smallest bathing suit in the world” after the site for a recent U.S. nuclear test off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

The idea was that the shock waves from the suit would be even greater than a nuclear blast. At about the same time, fashion designer Jacques Heim also introduced a similar swimsuit, called the “atome.”

Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson@icloud.com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter to Florida Flashback, c/o Dickinson, P.O. Box 1942, Orlando, FL 32802.