But the wet T-shirt contest seems to have first shown up in the United States a few years later, in the 1970s.
It's not entirely clear how the contest made its way to Floridian Spring Break parties. Some have speculated that the tradition was inspired by La Tomatina, a Spanish festival where people throw tomatoes at each other (thereby rendering many female participants' clothing damp and transparent). In his autobiography Breaking Even, filmmaker Dick Barrymore claimed to have hosted the first wet T-shirt contest as part of a 1971 promotional event for K2 skis, though the contest's first mention in the press wasn't until four years later.
That gem of journalism appeared in the Palm Beach Post in 1975, under the headline "Wet T-Shirt Contests Pack Pubs," and detailed how several "discotheques" in New Orleans had started putting on "a contest gimmick that would drive feminists prematurely gray."
The first known report on wet t-shirt contests in U.S. press.
A complicated, anti-feminist history: While it might seem ironic that the wet T-shirt contest arose during the second-wave feminist era, the tradition actually arose during a fairly politically conservative period. Having "given up on changing the world," as one college student explained to Newsweek the following year, the college students of the 1970s were apparently more inclined than their forebears to get drunk and flash their boobs, without giving much thought to the political implications.
It's not entirely clear how the contest made its way to Floridian Spring Break parties. Some have speculated that the tradition was inspired by La Tomatina, a Spanish festival where people throw tomatoes at each other (thereby rendering many female participants' clothing damp and transparent). In his autobiography Breaking Even, filmmaker Dick Barrymore claimed to have hosted the first wet T-shirt contest as part of a 1971 promotional event for K2 skis, though the contest's first mention in the press wasn't until four years later.
That gem of journalism appeared in the Palm Beach Post in 1975, under the headline "Wet T-Shirt Contests Pack Pubs," and detailed how several "discotheques" in New Orleans had started putting on "a contest gimmick that would drive feminists prematurely gray."
The first known report on wet t-shirt contests in U.S. press.
A complicated, anti-feminist history: While it might seem ironic that the wet T-shirt contest arose during the second-wave feminist era, the tradition actually arose during a fairly politically conservative period. Having "given up on changing the world," as one college student explained to Newsweek the following year, the college students of the 1970s were apparently more inclined than their forebears to get drunk and flash their boobs, without giving much thought to the political implications.
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