If you are an amateur anthropologist, or a student of fashion history, or just someone who wants to kill a few mindless hours this summer watching a vintage movie in front of the air conditioner, you might enjoy immersing yourself in the cheerfully inane genre known as the Beach Party movie. From 1963 to 1966, theaters offered gems with titles that included not just Beach Party, the first of the oeuvre, but Muscle Beach Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and even—not kidding—The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.
First off, you will notice the actor and actresses in these cinematic masterpieces—fake surfing in front of a green screen; canoodling on fake sand– are not ashamed of their pleasantly plushy bodies. They are by no means chubby, but they certainly are not brandishing what we have been given to believe is the appropriate movie star physique. How heartening it is to see semi-natural figures, and how our assumptions about attractiveness have changed over the subsequent decades!
If there is a genial silliness to these films’ plots—errant mermaids; goony motorcycle gangs, et al—they do offer an early distillation of what would become the dream American teenage wasteland—a few mindless months with no school, no job, and most importantly, no parents. (Gidget, who has a mom and dad, and stars an underdeveloped Sandra Dee, is an outlier in the series—its plot is sincere, its screenplay superior.)
There is also, to the best of my recollection, no jewelry decorating these voluptuous revelers, and no gems are involved in major plot twists—no stories that turn on that eternal tragedy, a precious keepsake floating away in the sea. (This happened to me as a young girl at Tobay Beach on Long Island. My peridot birthstone ring from A&S, a now defunct department store, disappeared in the waves. I never got over it.)
More than a half century after the ascent of the Beach Party movie, there is a veritable industry of glamorous ensembles meant for the shore—metallic cover-ups! Diamante mules! Humongous straw chapeaux! Wildly overpriced designer totes!—and there is also a plethora of summer jewelry, which we define here as a piece whose motif incorporates a shell, a fish, or other beach-y signifier. Though you could allegedly wear these all year long, would you really want to have a conch shell dangling from your ear when Santa is on his way?
Here, our roster of jewels to wear from now until Labor Day, or to put aside until you, like the quartet of yearning coeds in Where the Boys Are, make it to the coast for spring break.
Necklaces
Earrings
Bracelets
Body Chains
Brooches
Rings
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