Bikini season.

A few days ago, I came across a specific targeted ad on Instagram. Today, I’m still annoyed and pissed about it, and there’s a couple of reasons why that might be happening. First of all, I hate to admit that I was, indeed, scrolling on Instagram. I also hate to acknowledge that I fit into the target audience of that stupid ad. The ad was for a bathing clothes line, swimsuits, bikinis, and the like, which prides itself on being body positive and all that. As they do, the ad was shamelessly slid between quick swipes on my friend’s stories. Despite my tone, I didn’t let that intrusion stop me from clicking on the ad and being transported to their beige, pink, and pastel blue website. Tanned, smiling young women holding hands, running alongside the seashore. Just like Barbie and her friends, all of them proudly display a slightly different skin colour, but never in a way that causes too much contrast, so that the carefully designed colour scheme that paints this pleasantly feminine website may never be compromised. Palm tree leaves, hibiscus flowers, and minimal, thin, vectorised, vague line drawings of beach-related stuff embellish the header of each page. Hawaii? Biarritz? Bali? California? Yes. Summer vibes, friendship bracelets, embracing the woman you’ve become, forgiving your mother, the clothes you wore in high school and the secrets from our childhood we shall never tell. Yes, you. We grew up together, through heartbreak, menstrual pain and college admissions, and now, in our mid-thirties, we’ve experienced that sweet taste of bitterness that comes with the realness of adulthood. Oh yes, womanhood. A most-likely-fake quote of Frida Kahlo. Marilyn Monroe in a bikini. Sophia Loren in a bikini. A random woman in black and white in a bikini. Something about pasta and wine and how that somehow is related to the way you others perceive your body. Boyfriends will never understand why the fuck do I need another fucking bikini every single year and why the fuck is it so important to embrace my fucking curves, cellulite and every other little thing in my skin that shows that I’ve been alive so far. (Note: Body hair is a whole different campaign, a whole different market.)

The menu lies at the top of the page, and you just need to hover the cursor over the words so that they can be expanded into more words. Bikini top. Bikini bottom. One piece. I’m totally better than this, but I still want to follow the word bikinis, size M, while questioning myself if I’m an L, although I’ve once or twice worn S, especially when it comes to my breasts. Breasts and breasts and breasts and some pictures of really nice, rounded bottoms. Feeling the drips of sweat rolling down your back. Choosing a piece of clothing that doesn’t reveal sweat stains. The sunscreen ad at the pharmacy, the woman smiling through her wrinkled, experienced, loving eyes. She’s not using sunglasses; she sits directly in the bright, thin sand while holding her knees. The mild seashore calls for her in the back. She’s staring at me, fully trusting whoever’s behind the camera. A professional photographer? A long-time friend? Her loving partner, who holds her in their arms at night, listens to her rambles about work, supports her life-changing decisions. Agrees that Sara is a bitch. They always remember to call your mom. I don’t care about her bikini, but I do wonder if my butt looks like that, or if it ever looked, or if I did more workout it would. Would I want my butt to look like that? Would my boyfriend like it better if it did? What kind of feminist thought is this? What about Frida Kahlo, would she ever prioritise a workout session in favour of painting or drawing? No, because Frida Kahlo doesn’t even have space or time to consider such silly, stupid, irrelevant insecurities. I think Frida Kahlo would proudly embrace her belly rolls as she embraced everything else that made her the icon she is. She is no different from those girlfriends running by the seashore, holding hands and laughing out loud because they love themselves, their bodies and etc. And if Frida Kahlo were alive today, she would proudly be an influencer - that’s what every single bracelet and t-shirt and necklace that I was given between the ages of twelve to seventeen with her face on it taught me. Frida Kahlo challenged, broke and navigated the male-dominant world of visual arts so she could ultimately become, above everything else, a trend setter. Her style still influences young generations of art students everywhere, spreading its roots and rivers outside the art world through souvenir shop bracelets and bathing clothes lines. Why do they only offer me three colours, and why are all these colours different shades of pale orange? And why does body positive mean that a piece of clothing that I will probably wear five times a year now costs five times more?

When I leave this website, I will return to the Instagram stories carousel from which I jumped out. Between this bathing clothes line ad and a reel about dogs doing silly things that my sister re-shared, there’s another ad that was slid without my consent. But this time it’s about something terrible and uncomfortable that I try not to think about. I tell my boyfriend about the stupid ad and the bikinis that were forced into my world and how they tell me how I’m supposed to feel about my body and even myself, but I’m annoyed when he asks me why am I even looking for a new bikini if I already have one that I like and fits me well. He’s wrong. Every summer since I remember having to wear swimwear, Calzedonia, a brand that sells socks in the winter and bikinis in the summer, books a massive number of billboards all over the country to promote its summer collection. It’s 2025, and as far as I can tell, it’s already been shown and proved in multiple ways that body positivity is more than a flat, innocuous internet movement, but it’s above all a successful marketing tactic as light and flexible as any other hashtag used by corporations to profit over your insecurities, doubts and needs to fullfill. As #bodypositive is being replaced with #skinnytok, and low waist jeans resurge from the grave of trauma that Gen Z hasn’t been through like any chubby girl did in 2005, I wonder what Calzedonia’s Don Draper is going after when they insist on using airbrushed top models with unrealistic body types for their bikini campaigns. I don’t even care to fully understand; instead, I embrace this nostalgic mystery, its aggressive bluntness, since this boring, tasteless and redundant campaign is a living remembrance of what they’re really selling here and what we’re really trying to buy. Your body, your choice. In the middle of the dystopian apocalypse of misinformation in which we live, in which the reliability of the image has fallen by the wayside, its power has never been greater. Maybe for that very reason, everything becomes, ultimately, aesthetics. Everything can be branded. Everything can be recycled until it loses its meaning (if there was any in the first place). The right bikini and the right to embrace your belly rolls are slid into your stories alongside last night selfies and humanitarian aid campaigns. You can donate, buy or bargain for a new attempt to feel better about yourself, or you can walk into Calzedonia, buy a bikini and embrace the fact that you don’t look like their models, but you also don’t look like the girlfriends holding hands at the seashore in Bali, or was it California? Costa da Caparica? Or even if you do, it has nothing to do with the bikini, and probably never did.