A history of tanning around the world

If you’re lucky enough to have escaped to sunny shores of late, chances are your colleagues will have complimented you upon your return on your summer glow. Yet tanning as a fashionable practice is both a relatively recent historical phenomenon and one that varies according to place. In fact, sunbathing first became chic by accident, after Coco Chanel inadvertently caught too much sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. The photos of her disembarking from a yacht in Cannes set new beauty standards, which until then had associated darker skin tones with the lower classes’ outdoor toil.

The utopia of the “Polynesian” body

In France, historian Pascal Ory has sought to document the “epidermal regime” put forward by the French elites. From the medieval to the interwar period, white skin – including that obtained with powder – was associated with ivory or snow, acting as a powerful marker of aristocratcy. The artifice immediately distinguishes the aristocrat from the peasant, whose skin has also been transformed, but by toil and tan.

The 18th century and the Enlightenment put these norms to the test. As they map out the world, European explorers construct a space they called “Polynesia” as a distant paradise inhabited by the figure of the Other – embodied in particular by local women. As they discover the Tahitian nobility, the symbolic line between locals’ skin tone and the one that is celebrated in Europe at the time becomes blurred. The male aristocratic gaze exalts the beauty of the wahine (in French: vahiné), dubbing this new tropical paradise “New Cythera”, in honour of the Greek island of Cythera considered to be home to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

More generally, the skin colour of Tahitians is a departure from both the same (the “white” European) and the radical ther embodied by the “Melanesians” (inhabitants of the “black islands”). It was in the wake of primitivism and the construction of the “noble savage” (or “good savage”) that Gauguin’s geographical imagination through which the colours burst forth would later emerge. The painter echoed the orientalist narratives and Tahitian stories told by Bougainville in his Voyage autour du monde (1771). The barely clad “golden” body becomes acceptable through an otherness constructed by distance (temporal and spatial) that integrates it into the category of the “exotic” and the “erotic”. A new story about skin tones starts to take shape, and yet no one is talking about tanning yet.

“Rewilding” bodies

Our French and European perspectives aren’t sufficient to understand how tanning came about in the West, which we define as a discontinuous area spread by Europe and its ideas across the world. Similarly to Edward Said’s Orientalism, Tropicality, a potent discourse that constructs the tropical world as the West’s environmental Other, changed the way we view skin tones. It’s the Western vision of beaches in the “South Seas”, where exoticised bodies lounge on the sand, awaiting transformation by heliotherapy.

A decade or so separated French writer André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902), which captured the new pleasures of tanning, from Jack London’s Hawaiian tales, which set out some of the practice’s rules.

In The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which went on to become a bestseller in the United States, London sees the Honolulu neighbourhood of Waikīkī as the Mecca for muscular, tanned bodies crowding the world of surfing he came to know. High society, which distinguishes itself from the rest of society through its ability to travel, is ready to receive these images subverting the colonial gaze. Once tanned by the labour deployed outside, the working classes are now headed toward factory workshops, their skin pale. The fair complexion takes on a new stigma.

In Southern California, surf culture sought to “rewild” and beautify bodies by working out and freeing themselves from medical and hygienic standards, including by tanning. In Europe, tanning and new body standards spread as French and American actors mingle. A number of tourist attractions along the Côte d’Azur were designed to help these cultural worlds interact. During the Roaring Twenties, Americans fond of California and Florida spent more and more time in the French cities of Cannes, Antibes and Juan-les-Pins.

French American glamour

The millionaire couple of Sara and Gerald Murphy, who stayed at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, contributed to the advent of the summer beach by choosing to stay over the summer as well as the winter. Their social capital was combined with their “spatial capital”, so much so that the beach, now inhabited during the summer, was arranged to enable meetings between cultural players open to the avant-garde, writers and artists who were interested in “negro art”. Organised around the Lost Generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald…), this small world infused Paris, where Joséphine Baker became an “eroticolonial icon”.

Josephine Baker became an exemplary figure in the linking of American and French spaces when she was hired in 1925 by the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for the Revue Nègre. Such was the aura of the woman who was nicknamed ‘Black Venus’ that some ladies tried to emulate her by applying walnut stain to their skin.

Between the wars, the swimming costume market shrank at the cost of social struggles between the Catholic Leagues and the young modernist bourgeoisie. Combined with the success of sun creams, this stripping away of the skin reveals the sensuality that now associates the beach body with sun exposure and the (more or less ephemeral) transformation of the skin. The surge in tourism following the Second World War encouraged people to tan, in an intertwining of the therapeutic, the aesthetic and the hedonic. The anxiety associated with exposing the body to the sun was rekindled a few decades later with the emergence of new scientific knowledge questioning the vulnerability of different human skins to ultraviolet radiation. The repertoire of models for tanning widened, until it was no longer appropriate.

A globalised phenomenon?

Tanning is a practice that can be seen as a motif of globalisation. This also means that its dissemination comes up against cultural filters that alter its meanings or may not absorb it. Fair skin is still viewed positively in “Asian” cultures (China, India, Japan, Korea, etc.), so much that exposing one’s body to the sun comes across as subversive. In China, for example, a tan is strongly frowned upon, especially if it alters the female body, which is particularly invested by the norm of “milky” skin. No object exemplifies this cultural distate better than the facekini, a full-head mask covering the entire head except for the nose and eyes worn sparingly on the Chinese coast.

We can explain its success through the growing number of Chinese tourists who strip off on the coast, such as certain beaches on the island of Hainan (southern China), regularly referred to as the “Chinese Hawaii”. Even if the beach is still widely viewed by the Chinese as a place for play and socialising, sunbathing is growing more popular in the world of surfing, a water sport recently taken up by a small number of cosmopolitan individuals.