Berlin Is Grey. Someone Took Off the Top.
Two weeks of concrete sky over Berlin. The kind of grey that isn’t weather so much as a condition—it settles into the joints, makes the streetlights feel fluorescent even at noon, and does things to your mood that no number of vitamins can undo. Into this February tomb, Victoria’s Secret drops their latest contribution to human happiness: a bikini with no top.
Not a minimalist top. Not a barely-there bandeau. An actual coverless, fabric-free torso situation—just the bottom half of the equation, paired with the implication that this constitutes swimwear. They’re calling it the Topless Bikini, which at least has the decency to be honest about what it is.
The model is Lindsay Ellingson, who is beautiful in the way that most Victoria’s Secret models are beautiful, though whoever cast her for this particular item might have considered that the point of a topless bikini is to make a case for going topless—which plays differently depending on what’s being revealed. Ellingson is lean and angular, and the result reads more like a styling oversight than a fashion statement. This is $68 worth of string making its best argument for itself, and it could use a little more to work with.
The idea isn’t entirely bad. There’s a version of this that makes total sense: a seamless tan line, the freedom of swimming without something constantly trying to escape in every direction, the simple logic that the bottom half is doing all the structural work anyway. And if you’ve got the confidence for it—or just the indifference—it probably feels genuinely liberating.
But there’s no version of this that ends well for everyone who buys it, which is how fashion works in general. Victoria’s Secret is selling a fantasy, as always. The Topless Bikini is just unusually transparent about what it’s withholding.
Still. Two weeks of grey sky. I’ll take the news of a topless anything.