From the Archives: In the Early Aughts, Lynn Yaeger Took on the Luxury Bikini

“Swim at Your Own Risk,” by Lynn Yaeger, was originally published in the June 2002 issue of Vogue.

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This, then, is hell: not whatever Jean-Paul Sartre may have suggested, but you, alone, under the hot lights of the fitting room, staring into a three-way mirror at your untanned flesh in a bathing suit.

"It's the thing women say they like least in the world to do," says Necha Treitel, a saleswoman in Bergdorf Goodman's swimsuit department. "You see the absolute best bodies, but you end up being in the dressing room with them for a long time—they need plenty of hand-holding." Over the last few seasons, Treitel has had a lot more than workaday Lilly Pulitzers and Gottexes to offer her clientele: Runway designers who until recently confined themselves to big nights and boardrooms have lately expanded their vision to include the beach, and the result is a bathing-suit market swimming with perky Moschinos, oversexed Cavallis, camouflage Gallianos, and butterfly-bedecked Guccis.

Unfortunately, just as a pair of Louboutin flip-flops bears little resemblance, cost-wise, to the ones sold out of bins, prestige swimwear sports a price tag that no one would call shy. But somehow this doesn't seem to matter to the growing number of women who think wearing hot-label bathing suits is as important (and as much fun) as clomping around; the pool in the latest Jimmy Choos and a late-model Cartier watch. Why else would some denizens of Palm Beach spend $ 1,045 on this year's Leonard of Paris caftan and a matching $385 Leonard maillot when another gardenia-print cover-up might do the job as well? For the same reason not every fringed a I purse is a Balenciaga.

"This is the exact same print we sell on our third floor," says Treitel, fingering a filmy silk-chiffon Chloé peasant blouse ($375) that's meant to go over a Chloé swimsuit ($235) of a matching pattern (a design that includes dinosaurs, sea birds, and what appears to be a fat guy sitting on a beach). "This Missoni cover-up could definitely double as a dress!" she adds, showing off a slinky number in that company's trademark flame-stitched stripes.

"Look at this La Perla!" Treitel chuckles, brandishing a creation made of twin metal-mesh squares that looks like a deconstructed evening purse. You might think this item is meant to cover the transparent top of an itty $635 La Perla suit, but no, it is actually intended to shield the bottom of the bikini, fore and aft.

"Yes, we made that!" Gianluca Flore, La Perla's CEO, confesses. "But really, everything else we have, I promise, can go in the water." Flore has curly brown hair, Mediterranean-blue eyes, and an Italian accent. He refuses to admit that there's anything scary about swimsuit shopping. "What do you mean?" he asks, looking a little hurt. "How can it be a nightmare? Because it goes by emotion?"

La Perla may, it is true, prey upon our subconscious desires (does anyone really know why she suddenly craves an army-green beaded bikini?), but the company never loses sight of what makes a suit a suit. "We understand the cups, the bottoms," Flore says, "because we started as a lingerie company." Indeed, from a structural point of view, La Perla's minuscule suits are feats of delicate engineering as impressive as the Ponte Vecchio.

La Perla got its start in an apartment in Bologna 50 years ago, and the firm retains a European perspective to this day. "What we noticed, as a foreign company, was that ten years ago in America, people were using bathing suits as something to wear to go in the water." Flore observes, raising an eyebrow in faint disbelief. "This was not true in Europe. There they were thinking about the lifestyle behind the beach. When they shopped, they looked for the lifestyle."

Flore says that his company doesn't follow the trends, it sets them. If that's the case, be on the lookout for what he calls the "chainkini"—a two-piece whose bra is held together with a thick chain that could, should the occasion arise, double as a weapon.

Sarah Hailes, co-owner of Kirna Zabête, a SoHo shop decorated in primary colors that give it the look of a day-care center for debutantes, has a special place in her heart for the swimwear of Tomas Maier. Maier is the accessories designer responsible for those gorgeous woven-leather totes at Bottega Veneta; in his second life, he makes swimsuits that sell for up to $325 and formfitting silk caftans that go for a hefty $595. In spite of these tariffs, the athletic grace of Maier's sleek tanks and two-pieces has won him a cult following from Sardinia to Southampton. "It's perfect," Hailes says. "The perfect cut, the perfect fit, the perfect colors: camel, chocolate, burgundy. And. oh, his one-ply cashmere cover-ups! They're the best on the market."

Hailes's customers buy a new swimsuit every year, "like boots in the winter," and her store offers a tough-love approach to their fitting-room ordeal. "You know, we have three-way mirrors in every fitting room, so you can see yourself from every angle. I mean, why kid yourself?" she says. "And we even have a skylight. Natural light. It may not always be hyperflattering, but it does give you a true idea of how you look." Isn't this maybe just a little traumatic? "Oh, please," she says with a shrug. "You have your chocolate cake, you do a few sit-ups."

No cake, ever, and more than a few sit-ups are required for women who wish to look good in the almost impossibly abbreviated beachwear at the new Jean Paul Gaultier boutique on Madison Avenue, a group of suits that one of the shop's salespeople admits "would make a Brazilian blush." Leaning into a cut-glass vitrine, the salesman pulls out an extravagance as tiny as it is bold: a fluorescent-orange bikini made of molded rubber that has been covered with 3-D blossoms of the same hue. "This is the best bathing suit in town," he says, caressing its rubbery contours. "It's sort of a lounging bathing suit. For being glamorous at poolside."

This item, in fact, resembles nothing so much as a bathing cap. "Actually," the salesman says, "there is a matching cap, too. We should be getting it in any day now." Though the total price is a whopping $430. Gaultier has been nice enough to tag the halves separately: It's $180 for the bottom, $250 for the top.

Such whimsy is what makes high-end-designer shopping so entertaining. "You could wear just the top with suede pants," the salesman ventures, "or maybe even put it under a suit jacket." Here's a third idea: Wear it the way Gaultier showed it on his Paris runway, with your face painted blue.

Of course, sometimes a willingness to spend the big bucks isn't tied to label lust at all but springs from a rather more primal source: unbridled lust itself.

Ambika Conroy designs skimpy swimsuits for that gaggle of elegant hippies who, if forced to put on clothes at all, would rather slip into a teensy crocheted bikini than anything even marginally practical.

Only 22, Conroy was working as a photo assistant when she taught herself to crochet in the downtime between fashion shoots. Her original inspiration was a fantastically sexy Helmut Newton photo from the seventies of a woman in a bikini: She wanted that suit, and the only way to get it was to make it herself. "I thought most of the bikinis I could find were ugly," she explains in her sweet voice.

Models and stylists saw what Conroy was doing, and the next thing she knew, her tiny, bejeweled creations had found a home clinging, if barely, to the posteriors decorating the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. But for a discreetly placed insertion of Lycra, Conroy's work can sometimes seem closer to jewelry than clothing. "I grew up in India, and I love gems," she says. Conroy claims that she personally dunks all her creations in the tub to be sure they're seaworthy—and if the silver tarnishes a little, she doesn't mind. "I like it that way," she says. "It looks antique."

Turquoise, green chrysocolla, and ready-to-be-tarnished silver are strung together in the itty-bitty Ambika getup that model Yamila Diaz-Rahi wears in Sports Illustrated this year. The suit was supposed to be an exclusive, for the shoot only, but one heavy-breathing reader loved it so much he tracked the designer down and ordered it for his girlfriend. Conroy charged him $1,800.