The World’s Largest Speedo Collection Almost Oozed Away

Author: Abigail Cain / Source: Atlas Obscura

An Australian Olympic team swimsuit from the 1992 Barcelona Olympic games.

Since 1991, the institution has been home to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Speedo swimwear. The earliest suits in the archive date back to the 1930s and are made from navy blue cotton knitwear; more recent designs, such as the LZR Racer full-body suit, are so technologically advanced that they’ve been banned from the Olympics for making swimmers too fast. But the oozing, which conservators discovered in 2012 during a routine check of the collection, was limited to Speedos produced in the 1980s and early ’90s.

“It was a bit of a shock, in fact, to find this group of swimwear deteriorating in storage where it’s kept in the dark,” said Suzanne Chee, a textile conservator at the museum. “We keep our relative humidity constant and the temperature down in our storage facility, so something strange was happening in the drawers.”

To diagnose the affected swimsuits, Chee and her fellow conservators had to first determine their chemical composition. So, they selected a suit from the 1986 Commonwealth Games and subjected it to a series of in-house tests. (They also sent some fibers to the University of New South Wales for additional analysis.)

Suzanne Chee with the collection in the humidity control chamber.

Eventually, they fingered the culprit: The Lycra in the suits contained ester-based polyurethane, a plastic that deteriorates when it comes in contact with water. Even in the Powerhouse Museum’s climate-controlled storage area, there was enough moisture in the air to cause a gradual breakdown in the chemical bonds that resulted in stickiness and oozing.

These Speedos fell victim to what conservators call “inherent vice”—when the materials that make up an object cause it to deteriorate, even self-destruct.

Despite its flashy name, inherent vice is “no joke,” notes Sarah Scaturro, head conservator for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s a really distressing characteristic of an object for a conservator.” Certain methods of storing or displaying can help stabilize the item temporarily, she says. “But in the long term, we know that there’s nothing that can really be done to stop it” from falling apart.

The issue isn’t limited to swimsuits, or even clothing. The hand-drawn animation cels from classic Disney films such as Snow White, for instance, were manufactured with unstable plastics that have since caused extensive wrinkling and yellowing. But inherent vice has resulted in a strange quirk of textile conservation: A cellulose acetate dress from the 1960s, for example, could be in far worse condition today than Coptic linen dating back to the 4th century. It all depends on the composition of the textile—natural fibers like linen, cotton, and wool are relatively stable. But add in metallic dyes or a plastic like polyurethane, and there will be a problem somewhere down the line.

Yet for swimwear, in particular, the risk is worth it. Newly-developed materials like spandex and nylon (or the more recent “Fastskin,” modeled after the skin of a shark) can determine an Olympic champion.