Our Family’s Swimsuits Were Designed By World-Famous Architect Frank Gehry, And Innovation Is Worth Some Discomfort

Audrey Burges
Slackjaw
Published in
3 min readMay 10, 2021

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Photo by Brandon Smith on Unsplash

Kids, we haven’t planned a getaway in ages, and I think we deserve an escape — it’s time to squish our toes into soft sand, breathe in the salty sea air, and squeeze our spongy bodies into our razor-sharp edifices of glass, concrete, and metal.

Don’t even start with me. We’ve all been so impatient and snappish with each other, and I don’t want to hear another word. We are going on vacation. We are wearing our exclusive, ruinously expensive, inexplicably pointy Frank Gehry swimsuits. We are going to have a wonderful time, and that’s final.

Let me remind you how lucky we are. Not all families could commission swimsuits from the visionary architect behind the Bilbao Effect, revitalizing cities with his category-defying aesthetic. Not all families would, either, but look how our Gehry suits revitalize our derrieres!

He has reimagined the form a tankini can take, and when it comes to swimsuits, function is really secondary.

Do our bathing costumes occupy entire city blocks with their unwieldy, overlapping angles…

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Audrey Burges
Slackjaw

Author, THE MINISCULE MANSION OF MYRA MALONE (Berkley 2023); work in McSweeney’s, Belladonna, Slackjaw, & elsewhere. Twitter: @audrey_burges; audreyburges.com.