The Most Beautiful Girl in America

The 1921 Atlantic City Pageant’s central event kicked off with the rolling chair parade, as hundreds of flower-bedecked floats and chairs rumbled, this time down the boardwalk, the thrumming main artery of the city. The floats advertised businesses, amusements, and civic organizations from the Rotary Club to the Press-Union Company, represented by a nine-foot-long copy of the Atlantic City Daily Press bearing a headline announcing the pageant. The neighboring town of Ventnor’s procession stretched for an entire block, with the mayor leading, flanked by the police and fire departments. The beauties rolled too, flaunting their assets in the hope of winning one of the many prizes to be awarded at the crowning ceremony that evening. Wearing a gold-spangled dress and bronze-tinted shoes, Miss Washington, DC, Margaret Gorman bowed and smiled at hooting fans as children threw flowers in her path.To get more news about 疯狂的欧美乱大交, you can visit our official website.

The sixteen-year-old was already a star, having made a splash that morning in the beachfront Bathers’ Revue, where she and the others marched unsteadily along a 1,300-foot swath of sand roped off and marked with flags. Gorman wore a modest taffeta swimsuit with a tiered skirt and dark knee-high stockings, drawing cheers for her “natty beach rig” and earning points as well, since public enthusiasm counted toward contestants’ final scores. The others sported one- and two-piece suits, a few with skirts hanging to the knee, and one—Miss Pittsburgh—with pants that ended, shockingly, above mid-thigh.

They wore headbands to secure their hair in the wind, belts or scarves tied at the waist, and laced boots, flats, or low heels, posing for photos with feet splayed or even planted six inches apart, in contrast to the “pretty feet” stance prescribed in later years. Likewise, the compulsive smiling that later became a pageant hallmark wasn’t yet reflexive. Photos capture the hopefuls looking variously amused, relaxed, bored, impatient, distracted, or downright stern—charmingly human, and more like the children most of them were than the women they were presumed to be.

And yet something scandalous was happening. The New York Times reported that during the Bathers’ Revue, “the censor ban on bare knees and skintight bathing suits was suspended and thousands of spectators gasped as they applauded the girls, who were judged on their shapeliness and carriage, as well as beauty of face.”

The exposure of bare knees wasn’t just unusual; it was illegal. The city’s 1907 Mackintosh Law prohibited swimwear that ended more than four inches above the knee without stockings rolled up over the thigh to bridge the difference. It was enforced by “beach cops” who trudged around commanding offenders to “Roll ’em up, sister.” (Men, too, were required to cover their chests with tank tops.)

Bathing machines—mobile changing rooms wheeled into the surf to drop women in woolen dresses into the ocean unseen—had been retired at the turn of the century, and swimwear had since replaced streetwear at the beach. But there was still no consensus on appropriate fashion for women who now bathed—and increasingly swam—publicly. In 1907 the woman who invented the one-piece swimsuit, champion swimmer Annette Kellerman, had herself been arrested for indecency for wearing it on Revere Beach in Massachusetts. Designed for speed and intended to be paired with stockings instead of bloomers, it was braless, skirtless, and form-fitting—especially when wet, making it that much easier for this Australian powerhouse to break world records, and that much harder for Victorian holdouts to accept its contours.