Lhe thousand and one imprints that the sun inscribes on the skin reveal a lot, and probably a little too much. Before paid holidays, seaside tourism and tanning became accessible to the greatest number, these marks were worn as stigmata. Specific to agricultural workers, sometimes called rednecks in the United States, with bodies burned by the sun, and synonymous with hard work outdoors, they were reserved for proletarians.
Before, in the 1920s and 1930s, idlers, as free of their bodies as of their time, took all the time to refine a harmonious and golden tan that illuminated them from head to toe. Thanks to the cultural and sexual revolution of the 1960s, this social partition of the skin was to experience an upheaval that the cinema would witness.
A certain pride even animates individuals at the idea of displaying the traces of their week spent under the king star.
The James Bond girls are well placed to know it, Cary Grant and Alain Delon too: Technicolor loves the sun, the sea and delicately coppery skin. From 1967 and the famous Summer of Love, everything changed. Jane Birkin in blow-up, Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Romy Schneider in The swimming pool : swimsuit brands are revealed as the filmmakers undress (always a little more) their actresses.
Among them: Anne Bancroft, alias Mrs Robinson in The winner, which, directed by Mike Nichols, embodies a more frontal sensuality. Evidenced by the scene where, appearing completely naked in front of a Dustin Hoffman everything, his chest and his pelvis are the subject of furtive, repeated, panicked shots. Forbidden areas of white flesh, which contrast with the caramel tone, almost indelible, of skin day after day exposed and re-exposed to the idleness of a bourgeois life spent drinking and basking.
In the years that followed, lifestyles changed, outdoor leisure activities multiplied and the number of employees and managers increased prodigiously. Their bodies, an aspirin stamp the year, two-tone in the summer, represent a new standard. A certain pride even animates individuals at the idea of displaying the traces of their week spent under the king star: whether they are those left by sunglasses, a sign of a stay in the mountains or at the edge of a distant sea, by socks after a healthy week of trudges, a fashionable swimsuit or an imposing watch…
Social snitch, erotic or comic motif (Christian Clavier in The Bronzed), tan lines are also an indicator of managing your sun capital. Finally, memories of holidays, holidays and good times, they bring us back to those fleeting moments that we would like to last forever.
