WETLOOK IN POPULAR CULTURE

With my fascination for seeing and joining in with women who get wet through with their clothes on, I naturally enjoy seeing film footage, photographs, artwork and even literary descriptions of such activity. This essay celebrates the way in which the arts have used wetlook over the years.

A fascination for adding vast amounts of H2O to a spectacle goes back to antiquity. Tired of throwing Christians to lions, some later Roman Emperors flooded the Coliseum and other arenas to use crocodiles instead. There was probably little interest in the wet togas of the Christian girls swimming for their lives though. This was done with an emphasis on seeing the water turn red with blood.

The expense of clothing meant that many people would have few spare clothes, so keeping outfits dry and clean whenever possible probably robbed our forbears of the joys of experiencing wet bathing too much. Only when clothes got too lice riddled would they be washed, and probably not while still on the backs of their owners. Bathing and swimming was generally a nude experience.

In Britain, the cold climate probably made rain a miserable substance to experience in the past as it does today, other than on a warm hot sticky day, when a sudden shower might have been more welcoming. The idea of clothes for swimming and bathing in was not to evolve properly until the Victorian period. If someone got wet fully dressed before then, it was often due to shipwreck or tempest.

LITERATURE

Many plays begin with shipwrecked characters finding themselves cast on the shores of a land where they then have their adventures. Shakespeare wrote several shipwrecks into his stories, Twelfth Night and of course, The Tempest. Wetlook plays no part of course, as the characters are usually dry and expressing relief at t their survival before moving on to where the story really kicks in. The theatres of the Elizabethan Age had no convention for soaking the actors (when men would have played the women wet or dry anyway). Wetlook itself was rarely depicted therefore, but its first significant artistic presentation does come from Shakespeare.

The first and most famous explicit literary wetlook description comes from Hamlet, with the death by drowning of Ophelia. With the impracticalities of showing her drown in a muddy pond on stage, the scene is described by the understandably distraught Queen, Gertrude, as having just occurred off-stage. Here is the description in full.

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.

There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;

Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes;

As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and indu'd

Unto that element: but long it could not be

Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death.

Hamlet Act 4. Scene 7.

There is a great deal of speculation on whether poor, wretched mad Ophelia committed suicide, or simply perished in a fit of madness. A later scene in the play itself concerns an argument on the ambiguity, in that ministers convinced that she wilfully took her own life are burying Ophelia in unconsecrated ground.

For wetlook fetishists, the Death Of Ophelia is iconic, and troubling. I have a preference for imagery of women getting wet without being in danger or distress. A woman who looks as if she is luxuriating as water billows her skirts around her is more aesthetically pleasing than images of a woman drowning or threatened by sharks.

Ophelia is clearly described as falling, rather than jumping to her death. She is trying to gather flowers, which she will still be clutching as her waterlogged heavy dress pulls her to her doom. Her death does seem less than voluntary or wilful.

I shall return to the subject matter of Ophelia in the way that her fate has influenced other creative work later. The imagery for wetlook reflection is divine. The clothes bear the girl up, and she looks like a mermaid, natural to her environment, until the weight of her outfit turns against her and she slowly sinks away. There is innocence and a beauty to her tragedy that the words capture more than actual site of the event could convey.

D. H. Lawrence uses water to great affecting much of his work. Lady Chatterly’s Lover sees the good lady run happily in the rain, soaking and sensually removing her clothes, for her own as much as his delight before they make love in his little shed, and she puts her wet garments back on to walk home without a care in the world. The rain gives a sense of her daring and decadence. She could catch a chill, she is warned, but she is so ecstatic that she cares not one jot at that stage.

In The Virgin And The Gypsy, Lawrence returns to the wetlook experience, but in a darker way. The gypsy rescues the heroine as a dam breaks and they end up in her flooded house, wading through the waters downstairs and even make love while the girl’s mother lies dead in the same room. The story conveys a sense of contempt for the old vales of the puritanical mother figure, as the virgin gives in to temptation with the nomadic gypsy figure. The water is seen as washing away the valises of an old illiberal world order.

In Emile Zola’s novel Germinal, the hero, Ettiene Lantier is trapped in a flooded coalmine with his girlfriend, in their soaked overalls. They make love, even with a corpse bobbing up and down as the waters lap around them and their tiny little ledge, just before she dies of hypothermia and exhaustion. Here, the water is a clear threat, rather than an ally, and the lovemaking is seen as a means of talking the mind off the inevitable, though Lantier is rescued soon after the girl perishes.

Many novelisations exist of films and TV shows that have featured wetlook, but few take much care with description beyond saying whether the water was deep, shallow, hot or cold.

In The Brothers Karamosov, Dostoyevsky has a girl commit suicide by trying to imitate the method allegedly used by Ophelia, but she dies without grace in a clumsy desperate fall instead. It is not known if any women who have committed suicide by drowning have taken inspiration from Shakespeare or Millais too.

MODERN DRAMA

Modern theatres have much more sophisticated stage sets and designs than those of Shakespeare’s day. Some plays have made great use of water. Singing In The Rain has been staged with heavy sprinklers, though it is usually the male lead that gets wet recreating Gene Kelly’s famous wet dance. The female lead is seen getting soaked at the close of the story but usually wears a raincoat.

More ambitious is Alan Aykbourne’s Way Upstream a play about two couples falling out on a canal cruiser holiday. The play is often set on a canal boat on a pool of water designed to look like part of the river, and characters do end up swimming.

WETLOOK IN ART

Ophelia’s death inspired a great deal of art, and poetry. Arthur Rimbaud’s 1870. description of her demise is almost as moving and lyrical a verse as that of the Bard himself. http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Ophelia.html.

Eugène Delacroix’s Death Of Ophelai painting. 1843. http://www.si.umich.edu/Art_History/demoarea/details/1961_2.19.html This is a good image of a bedraggled woman desperately holding on to a branch as she lies exauusted by her efforts to escape a watery death. It does not realy relate to the Ophelia story as Shakespeare gives it. His Ophelia makes no effort to save herself or cling to life. Here,the drowningwoman holds on to a branch as she slides downthe bank back into the weater that will claim her.

Pre-Raphaelite artists competed with one another to depict Ophelia on canvas, giving the most spectacular visual, rather than literary-verbal presentations of her wetlook available. Keith Waterhouse’s 1894 painting, Ophelia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ophelia_1894.jpg shows the girl sitting by the water, with her flowers, on the brink of her fall. More graphic, famous and controversial is John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. Which was painted in 1852. Here is Ophelia in the water, floating on her back, with the flowers clutched, at the brink of her ecstatic swim and singing her melodies just before her situation becomes more critical. The darkened heaviness of the dress is captured with near photographic realism. The reason for this is simple – Millais worked with a model, Elizabeth Siddall, who lay in a bath of freezing water over several modelling sessions in the very dress depicted to give Millais his inspiration. She caught a fever and almost died herself. Millais constantly forgot to warm up the water or provide warmth by candlelight for her. Millais’s realism is given further strength by the realistic use of flowers that are both full of life and dying away. They are the very flowers described in Shakespeare’s own depiction of the tragedy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Millais_-_Ophelia.jpg

A HISTORY OF THE SWIMSUIT – HOW WE LOST OUR CLOTHES IN THE WATER

The Victorians invented wetlook as a fashion statement. To that date people got wet from necessity or in dangerous situations, or by accident, (i.e., getting caught in the rain).

The railways gave people from the cities access to the sea. The English coastal resorts of Brighton and Blackpool flourished. On Summery days people liked to go down to the Sea it, many would paddle and even swim, in their clothes or, when no one was looking, in the nude. The Victorians were keen on cleanliness. They had largely revived the Roman spas and swathe medicinal value of long soaks in water. The Sea itself was seen as a healthy source of healthy cleansing. Swimming became fashionable.

The problem for Victorians was that as well as wanting to swim, they were Puritanically modest. Nudity, and anything like a modern bikini style costume would have offended them. Early bathing costumes were essentially modified long dresses and clothes. Victorian bathing dresses were usually worn over swimmer’s bloomers and knickerbockers. In the water these might float and feel light, but once wet through, the bather would feel very heavy as she stood up.

What was probably less expected, was that such attire would come with a sex appeal all of its own. Dresses would billow out and give some exaggeration and shiny gloss to breasts and derriere. Women would also be in danger of getting into difficulties in heavy garments that could waterlog if they swim for too long, or too far out to sea. This gave male bathers an eagerness to be around to rescue their maidens, and erotic value of the wet dress began to be noted.

Male bathing suits were often lighter, and looked like a setoff long johns, or a body stocking. Men could swim more freely and faster, making it easier for them to outrace their girlfriends and wives.

That so many seaside pictures, and even drawn postcards of the period depict women in the water in there bathing dresses demonstrates this all too clearly.

Of course, a major promise of wet clothes is that sooner or later, they have to come off. The bather has to change to dry things or risk catching a chill. The bathing hut became a mobile changing room, and men were able to watch in eager expectation for girls leaving the huts in costume, and waddling back to it in their dripping outfits ready to change back into dry things.

Some huts would be set up the beach away from the water. Others were designed to allow girls (and men) to step into the hut through a dry door while stepping out of another straight into the water.

By Edwardian times, the heavy Flannel one piece outfit was replaced by a two piece suit, which meant that a woman could swim more freely, With the Victorian suits, a forward stroke of the arms would be dragging the weight of a whole dress. Now, the top half of her swimsuit left the dress portion independent and women began to swim around more freely and easily. By World war One, trousers began to replace the heavy dress, giving women bathers a more masculine look, which again at least allowed them grater freedom to exploit the water.

With time, more was revealed as the outfits were allowed to shrink away. Sleeves were cut down, and later removed. Ankles no longer had to be concealed so the trousers and skirts began to rise up. In some ways, the more clothing the better aspect of wetlook was in jeopardy to the rise of the one-piece swimsuit.

In the 1940’s and early 1950’s swimwear for ladies began to take on the influence of the corset maker. Bathing huts were now a relic of a bi-gone age. They attracted too many men for many women’s liking so women were more likely to find a private stretch of beach or a lady’s toilet on the promenade for changing. The decline of the bathing huts meant that women wanted to have swimwear that they could wear under ordinary clothes ready to strip away the layers they wanted to keep dry, and get right into the water. Again, the tendency for undesirable men to leer and ogle was responsible for an evolutionary leap away from wetlook. The bloated dress design was sacrificed for a corset design with breast hugging bra like cups, and shortened, often non-existent legs. Corsets themselves were falling out of fashion, as women would wear bra and panties and possibly suspenders but less corsetry and other cumbersome underwear. The modern one-piece swimsuit was a corset-makers way of saving his industry.

With the Bikini exploding (like the atom bomb on Bikini Island that it was named after) in the 1960’s, the change in values was almost complete. In its infancy, few women took to the bikini. It struck many as too shocking, and boyfriends could be inflamed to jealousy by how much of a girl’s flesh it put on show to other men. The bikini was seen as something for film stars and prostitutes. Jane Russell was the first major actress to wear one in a film, which was called appropriately, Underwater. (1955) Legend has it that director; Howard Hughes claimed that he had the bikini invented personally especially to show of the leading lady’s charms. In fact, the inventor was one Louis Reard, in 1946.

In the 1990’s the skimpiest of bikinis was dwarfed by the popularity of the Thong, G-String, and Tanga swim suits, which leave as little as possible to the imagination. Frankly, it surprises me that thee Tanga wearer doesn’t just strip off totally and have done with it.

Gradually however, women began to favour the two-piece over the one piece. Now only breasts, buttocks and crotch were covered at all. With topless and naturist beaches, even these were dispensed with. The social norm was for swimmers to wear less rather than more.

Wetlook enthusiasm would recur mainly for people who had arrived at the beach or riverbank without a swimsuit and still wanted to go into the water. It was letters columns in fetish journals like Forum Magazine, and Internet websites that would draw wetlook enthusiasts together and stop people thinking that they alone had such a fixation.

While wetlook is increasingly popular, it is never likely to be taken up byte majority of swimmers, and nor should it be.

PHOTOGRAPHY

From the earliest camera invented, the Seaside was a favourite place to take a camera, with so manly panoramic views and of course, the happiness of girls splashing about in the surf.

The camera created a flourish in erotica and pornography. Most early photographers had to develop their own pictures in private dark-rooms, so keeping a stash of erotic images a secret was relatively easy, in a way not seen again until the dawn of digital photography and computer image scanners. Most photographers from the mid 1950/s to the late 1980’s would be dependent on commercial high street chemists for getting their pictures developed.

Wetlook images were common themes for early photographers, especially once pictures could be taken without everyone in the image having to stand still for several minutes of exposure time. Gils getting innocently wet in bathing costumes, or playing other sports that did interesting things to their body shapes could be taken openly, and used for private erotic indulgence later. Nude bathing shots would be kept hidden away from prying eyes.

A great deal of waterside imagery is grainy and distant, as most cameras were not themselves waterproof until late in the 20^th century. This robs a great deal of wetlook imagery of intimacy as the subjects of more candid shots are often well away from the cameras.

The instant camera allowed pictures to be developed by the camera within seconds of being taken, but by then the Bikini bombshell had gone off.

In the 1980’s David Wilkey produced probably the first books dedicated exclusively to wetlook photography and art. Moving Pictures and Second Skin,, giving wetlook an aesthetic respectability.

CINEMA

Girls have been soaked in many ways since the conception of the cinema. Silent slapstick frequently involved people taking a spectacular soaking.

More dramatic, though still funny is Fatty Arbuckle’s Fatty & Mabel Adrift (1916) in which a married couple find themselves trapped in their house during a spectacular flood. They first realise their danger when their bed (in which they have just woken up) in their pyjamas, ) begins to float round the bedroom. They fall off the bed in their nightclothes and dodge various bits of furniture as they struggle out onto the roof. By now, the house itself is floating down the floodwater. Fatty gets his dog to swim ashore and get the Keystone cops to come to the rescue before the house sinks or goes over a waterfall. The humour and tension counter-foil one another perfectly.

A highly inventive silent classic is Buster Keaton’s The Navigator, filmed in 1924. In this, Keaton plays a spoilt brat rich kid who even drives a car to visit the house literally across the street from his own. His girlfriend is equally spoilt. One night, for revenge some enemies trap them both on an unmanned passenger liner, and set it adrift. Before long the couple, each oblivious at first that the other is aboard, find themselves on a deserted ship. Eventually cannibals capture them. Keaton, in a deep sea diver’s outfit, rescues his girl, but their ship sinks, and it looks as if they might drown, but the final shot shows them rising up on the deck of the surfacing submarine sent to their rescue, with a lovely slow close up on the girl in Keaton’s arms.

One of the most spectacular and genuinely dangerous to film wetlook scenes is in D. W. Griffiths’s 1920 film, Way Down East where Lillian Gish is trapped on a melting ice pack on a river; heading for a waterfall. The hero, played by Richard Barthelmess, leaps from ice block to ice block to rescue her, the film was shot on location.

In Laurel And Hardy’s classic short, Men’ O War (1929) the hapless heroes take a boat onto a boating lake, and accidentally sink several other boats. The people from the boats, many of them girls in 1920’s style flapper dresses, swim to the Stan and Ollie boat and get on board to tell the boys off. As the boat gets more and more full of passengers, it inevitably sinks and everyone gets wet again.

A colorized version of the film was released recently, and though it looks superficially good, the water-sheen effect is exaggerated, and looks much better in its original depiction.

The talkies arrived almost overnight and many silent stars were unable to adapt to the changing medium, which is a shame given the amount of wetlook that the cinema still had to offer.

Jungle based movies offered a natural setting in which to soak a leading lady. Rivers had to be swum or forded. Swamps had to be negotiated. Crocodiles had to be warded off by the hero as the heroine swam for her life to the shallows and trembled at the thought that of her beefcake lover being eaten alive.

One of the earliest and still the best Tarzan films, Tarzan, The Ape Man (1931) has Johnny Weismuller dragging Maureen O’Hara’s Jane into a river, where they embrace, and he makes great humour of dunking her under the surface. The longevity of the scene, and close ups of the dress on Jane as she wraps herself around the swimming trunks only was daring in a country eager for censorship control. The scene has never been bettered.

King Kong (1933) depicts Fay Wray escaping the gorilla that goes ape over her by jumping into a fast flowing river with the hero, but we see little of her wetlook, and she dries remarkably quickly once she gets out of the water. (This is a problem affecting countless wetlook films since). Much better was her wetlook in The Hounds Of Zaroff, (aka The Most Dangerous Game) filmed on the Kong set. Here, Wray, chased by a mad hunter, Zaroff, wades for a while through a deadly swamp, getting her dress all darkened and mud-stained.

Polls of water that prove to be deeper than expected are always good for a bath-laugh. In Bringing Up Baby (11938), Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant cross what they think is a shallow stream, which they immediately find out is actually about six foot deep. They swim across the rest of the way arguing with one another all the way.

Westerns often produced a gag in which someone throwing buckets of water over the combatants stopped a barroom brawl. In Destry Rides Again (1939) the fighters are women, and one of them is Marlene Dietrich, so the wetlook catfight that continues after the water is applied is awesome.

James Stewart was in Destry, and he also appears in one of the mist famous, imaginative and unusual wetlook scene movies of all time, it’s A Wonderful Life. (1946). This heart-warming Xmas favourite features Stewart and his leading girl, (Donna Reed, dancing in a club where the dance floor is built over a swimming pool. A lever is accidentally pressed that retracts the floor, plunging the dancers into the pool, where they simply carry on dancing as more and more of the dancers join in with the fun. It is good to see so many long dresses and gowns getting wet like this.

1952 gave us one of the best wetlook movies of all time, The African Queen, with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn getting very wet taking their little steamboat through the African Congo. Hepburn swims several times in the film, even joining Bogart in pulling the Queen through a leech infested swamp (Director John Huston used real leeches for realism). The final scene, as The Queen sinks the German warship just as its crew prepare to hang the heroes sees the leading actor and actress swimming for shore deeply in love with one another.

The horror movie The Creature From The Black Lagoon is noted for two things, 1/. Groundbreaking underwater photography. 2/. The scene in which the heroine takes a swim in the lagoon, oblivious f the monster hat swims along voyeuristically admiring her charms. Wears only a swimsuit in this scene (she is later taken by the monster when she wears a blouse and shorts). The scene remains both erotic in itself, and also shows how well cameras could be used for underwater filming

Given the eroticism of wetlook, you might expect Hollywood to soak its leading sex goddesses at every opportunity, but Marylyn Monroe rarely got wet with her clothes on. In fact, she does so in only one film, River Of No Return, (1954) when, with Robert Mitchum, and a child actor, she ends up on a raft that gets caught up in a setoff rapids, showing all too fleeting glimpses of her wet hair and jeans.

Munroe starred in Niagara, (1953) which you might expect to give plenty of opportunity for wetlook. Monroe is actually murdered in proximity to the falls, but she wears a heavy raincoat to protect herself from the water. It is co-star, Jean Peters, who gets really wet when she ends up on a boat that is in danger of going over the falls. She clamours onto rocks and takes a serious drenching as she slips and slides around precariously in shorts and a checked shirt until a helicopter rescues her.

Monroe lost out on more wetlook opportunities with her untimely death during filming of Something’s Got To Give. Some footage remains of scenes in a swimming pool, but for these, Monroe was wearing ordinary swimwear. When the film was remade as Move Over Darling, with Doris day in the lead in i963, with a virtually unchanged script, two decent wetlook scenes appeared. In one, Day is stuck in a car with open windows as it goes through a care-wash. In the closing scene, as she reunites with her estranged lover, James Garner, she throws herself into the swimming pool fully clothed with him and his children, as the credits roll.

This is one of the great Sod’s Law moments wetlook fans hate. Credits roll over a wetlook image or scene, obscuring the action. Other anger inducing escapes from true wetlook include: 1/. The camera cuts to another scene as the actress hits the water. 2/. In some scenes we know a girl is in the water, in clothes, but the camera stays focussed on the male lead. 3/. The camera shows only the dry parts of the girl that are above the surface of the water, never showing the wet bits of her anatomy or her outfit. 4/. The actress dries of almost the instant she gets out of the pool, bath, ocean, etc. 5/. Lighting darkens inexplicably. 6/. The camera suddenly moves as if in the hands of someone having an epileptic seizure.

Doris Day was one f the true queens of wetlook. She gets wet in several films. In Calamity Jane (1953) she gets herself all prettied up to impress a man, and then falls in a muddy creek, making a complete mess of her. Many of her musicals were screwball comedies, which involved a lot of slapstick. In The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) she plays a pretend mermaid who has the job of swimming under the glass bottom tourist boat as a gimmick. Perhaps a fish tail is not strictly clothing, but it comes close for many wetlook enthusiasts. Doris is later soaked in foam and water when her hi-tech kitchen appliances get out of control. It was a formulaic approach to film making to get Day as messed up as possible in her finest outfits.

In science fiction, This Island Earth (1954), alien death rays lead a couple to hide by submerging themselves in a river. Faith Domergiue wears one of the best white top and dance-hall dress combinations possible for this, but she dries almost instantly as she gets out of the water.

La Dolce Vita (1960) directed by Frederico Fellini provides what is undoubtedly the best-remembered wetlook scene ever shot. It features swimsuit model Anita Eckberg wading and dancing thigh deep in Rome’s Trevi Fountain. The scene oozes sex appeal and erotic charm as the dress floats on the surface round her. The scene adorns billboards and postcards to this day and it has been much imitated but never bettered. What is not known is that the scene had to be faked. Roman law forbids wading and swimming in the Trevi Fountain. Singer Madonna was recently arrested and cautioned for jumping into it). Fellini built a scale model of the fountain in a studio and made cinematic history.

Fellini also gave us The Nights Of Cabiria, starring Guilietta Masina's as a prostitute with a heart of gold who always picks bastard boyfriends. The film opens with a man pushing her into a river, where she almost drowns. Some bemused boys who can barely take their eyes off her bedraggled state and her short skirt rescue her. The film was remade in Hollywood in 1969 as Sweet Charity, a Bob Fosse musical, starring Shirley Maclaine. Again the story opens with the heroine being pushed into a river and left for dead, though Maclaine is left looking dishevelled rather than particularly sexy when she is fished out.

The Trevi Fountain had in fact featured in an earlier wetlook related movie, 1954’s Three Coins In The Fountain, in which a drunken woman stubbornly climbs into the water, refusing to get out. When begged, she sits down, chest deep in the water and her male friend has to step in to help her out.

Another well-known wetlook scene is that in 1955’s summertime, in which Katherine Hepburn falls into a Venetian canal in along white dress. The film was a turkey, but the scene was remembered for being shot on location in a polluted canal. Hepburn got an eye infection, which makes her squint in every film she made since.

Her unrelated namesake, Audrey Hepburn rarely got wet, but did so

Beautifully in Roman holiday. (1952) When she and co-star Gregory Peck escape from he press by swimming across the Tiber. Hepburn giggles in delight at the naughtiness of her adventure.

Musicals are a surprisingly rich source of wetlook. The gold-diggers films of the 1930’s featured a great deal of aqua-ballet. Aqua-dancer Esther Williams made a career of acting and synchronised swimming, and sometimes appears in clothes. In Jupiter’s Darling (1955) she swims divinely in a toga.

The swinging sixties gave us increasing levels of sex and raunch. Beach movies like Blue Hawaii featuring Elvis Presley. The film features two decent wet scenes; in one a girl with a crush on the King fakes drowning herself to get his attention. In the other, earlier scene, Elvis meets his girlfriend who comes to the beach to show off her new Hawaiian Summery dress. He immediately drags her into the sea. When she moans that he never even noticed the colour of the dress, Elvis replies that on her, wet is his favourite colour. It is one of the most explicit sexual references to the male pleasure in female wetlook on film.

Dr. No (1962) introduced the cinema’s best-known secret agent, James Bond 007. It also made a wetlook superstar of leading lady Ursula Andress 9or Undress as she was sometimes nicknamed). The most famous image in the film is of Andress rising from the sea in a white bikini, but she spends about twenty minutes also wading around in a waist deep mangrove swamp in a white tee shirt and her bikini briefs. At one point, she even joins Bond (Sean Connery) underwater where they hide using reeds as makeshift snorkels. Once captured by Dr. No, the pair is subjected to a shower, to reduce their radiation levels. The shower starts with them being foamed down while still partially dressed. There are wet scenes in later Bond movies, but nothing compares with the Andress experience in Dr. No.

Bond films were easy to spoof. Dean Martin made a series of films about a spy called matt Helm, which though lame compared to Bond as action or comedy films, certainly matched them in levels of wetlook. Helm has a novel way of waking up of a morning. His bed is set to an alarm clock, which tells it to tip its occupants right into a swimming pool. Helm invariably puts the leading lady there in the course of at least two of the films. He even sings a song called ‘Make ‘Em Wet, Make ‘Em Wet’ as he does so in one of the films (which all blur into one another, frankly). In the second film, Murderers Row, (1966) Matt is assisted by Anne Margaret, who swims with him when they crash a hovercraft owned byte main villain. As they are winched from the sea by helicopter, Anne Margaret, in a dripping mini-skirt, laughs at Helm’s underwear as she clings to him in a way that almost loses him his trousers. In 1969’s The Wrecking Crew, Hem has two famous leading ladies, Elke Summer, and Sharon Tate 9filming shortly before her murder at the hands of Charles Manson). Tate has a great wet scene in which she decides that a large and obviously deep lake looks shallow enough to paddle across. She plunges in right over her head and slowly walks out, with her hat still matted to her head, spluttering to Helm that he was right and it was too deep. . Tate made just one more film before her death, The Twelve Chairs (1969) in which she plunges into a pool to fish out a chair, which might or might not have a fortune hidden in its lining. The transparency of her top, and the absence of a bra are very noticeable as she emerges from the water.

Half A Sixpence, a Tommy Steele musical made in 1967, based on Kipps by H G Wells, It features a spectacularly wet song and dance routine set around the Thames in a heavy rain storm, and was filmed on location with artificial rain. It is said that the shooting raised the water level of the mighty river by two inches.

A much imitated wetlook scene takes place in 1967’s Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke when a chain gang from a prison are working on a road when a young attractive woman washing a car teases them mercilessly by getting more soapy water onto herself than onto the car. The men sweat and squirm in the their unrequited lust as she tortures them knowing that they can never get remotely close to her.

1968 gave cinema a film with perhaps the most wetlook of any mainstream feature, The Party, starring Peter Sellers. And Claudina Longet. Sellers play a hapless actor who is invited to a rich Hollywood party by accident, and ruins everything. The premise is simple. Sellers and a drunken waiter, betwenthem, slowly cause anarchy leading to spectacular destruction. The house is filled with swimming pools and water features, mostly covered by floors that can be moved around by electronic buttons. It is obvious that any such house would be the scene of people falling into water all the time. It is an accident waiting to happen. Sellers arrive and promptly get curious about the buttons. Almost immediately he sets a fountain off and soaks a young lady up the back of her evening dress. Later, trying to cover up for breaking a toilet, Sellers falls over a ledge into the water and almost drowns. The heroine, Longet, tries to gentlemen to save him, but eventually jumps to his rescue herself. The sight of her panties through her now transparent dress is delightful. As Sellers dries off, the special party guests arrive. They are a troupe of Russian Cossack dancers. As they dance, Sellers moves the floor back and the Russians all fall into the swimming pool. The best is yet to come, as the host’s teenage hippy daughter arrives with her friends and an elephant. They have painted the elephant with slogans and kaleidoscopic colours. Sellers, playing a Hindu Indian, objects to the insult to his religion, and leads a procession to get the elephant washed. This puts everyone into the pool with elephant scrubbing duties. The hostess is panicked and faints into the pool. She is rescued, but several more sights shock her and she falls in again and again. The finale has the wet guests hitting a foam making machine that literally fills the house up with detergent and virtually everyone gets soaked, as Sellers and his new girlfriend drive away from the devastation. A wetlook classic in every respect and a very funny film too.

In 1971, Raquel Welch appeared in Hannie Caulder, a revenge-western in which her title character buys a new pair of jeans, and wearsthem in the bath to get them to shrink down to fit her more sexily. They are still wet when she goes out shopping later on, much to the delight and confusionof a shop-keeper who can’t help staring at her.

The 1970’s saw he rise of a whole new genre in which wetlook could thrive, the disaster movie. One of the first and best was Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. In this, a passenger liner turns upside down, forcing the surviving passengers to clamour through an upside down world filled with fire and water hazards. Flooded passages greet several women who are wearing hot pants and short skirts. One woman in a longer dress has to tear it away to make walking and climbing easier for her, which means that when she swims her panties are very visible. Her husband, Ernest Borgnine, gets very upset at how much leg and thigh she displays.

The best known scene features the largest wetlook star, Shelley Winters, who saves leading actor Gene Hackman from a watery doom, only to die herself immediately afterwards. Her girth makes her heroism and stamina seem unlikely, but she achieves her end with some dignity. A lame and pointless sequel, Beyond The Poseidon Adventure was made in 1979, and is best seen only for Sally Field wearing a very wet green trouser suit for much of the latter half of the film.

There had of course been earlier shipwreck films, such as The Last Voyage, in 1961 in which Dorothy Malone is trapped in her cabin in a sinking ship as her husband struggles to free her before she can drown. The film was so lacklustre that it could never have sparked a genre like The Poseidon Adventure did.

Bizarrely, even an airplane set disaster movie got some wetlook scenes involved. Airport 77 (1977) has a Jumbo Jet crash and sink into the sea with its passengers trying to survive there. Even the wetlook was unmemorable.

Several films have been made of the real maritime tragedy that was the Titanic voyage. The best is A Night To Remember, (1958) which tells the story with documentary realism. Women get wet, but in such a true tragic tale there can be no erotic value. Sadly, with Cameron’s take on the tale, Titanic, in 1997, the fictional elements take over so much from the true story that the film becomes an expensive travesty. Kate Winslett is certainly beautiful as she wades through the cold flooded lower decks trying to rescue Leonardo De Cappio, and she later swims again in climatic post sinking drama, but the film induced anger for me rather than erotic arousal. In one scene, a crewman who was a genuine hero of the tragedy of April 1912 is seen panicking and shooting passengers trying to crowd their wait onto the last lifeboat. Had the character been entirely fictitious I might not have cause to object. The wetlook becomes superfluous after knowing that.

Bo Derek is probably the actress most identified with wetlook movie making. She made her name in a film called 10, in which she mostly runs around in a wet bikini with braided hair. It was however her remake of Tarzan, The Ape Man in 1981 that gains her a place in the wetlook hall of fee (and the quality cinema hall of shame). The idea was clever; remake Tarzan from Jane’s point of view. Have a feisty woman seduce the mild mannered jungle lord instead of having her whisked away by his primal urges. Bo’s Jane gets wet in her clothes even early on in the film, falling off a boat-jetty. She later wades through a river in the jungle (location shooting this looks very pretty) deceiving to clean up from her wade, Jane swims in the sea, naked at first and then fully clothed. A lion keeps her from leaving the water. Later, she meets the dumbest, mutest Tarzan ever played on film (Miles O’Keefe as a total lummox). He has been shot, so Jane washes him down with bits of wet cloth cut from her dress, before she joins him for a river swim. This is a re-enactment of the Weismuller/O’Sullivan swim from the earlier version covered, but now Jane is taking the lead. The film is dull to the point of mind numbness, with only a few decent set pieces of pseudo-porn to liven it. The wetlook looks pretty but it isn’t worth the other hour and half of the viewer’s time.

The Bo Derek Tarzan picture highlights a common problem for wetlook enthusiasts. Many great wet scenes are in such dire films. Sophie Loren does a nice wetlook dive in a dress when she is a pearl diver in Boy On A Dolphin (1957). I doubt if many remember any other details of the movie apart from the well-known publicity shots of her in that dress. Elke Sommer is the female lead in Zeppelin, which ends with her swimming for her life as the Zeppelin crashes into the sea, but the film is so lousy that few will wait until that closing moment to see her do it.

The Getaway, filmed in 1972, with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw contain some of the sexiest wetlook scenes of all time. Released from prison for the first time, McQueen is clearly eager for sex with his girlfriend. They drive by a park with a river in which children are swimming. McQueen daydreams about running and jumping into the water in his clothes and imagines McGraw jumping in after him. The scene shows a slow motion embrace as the pair swims into one another’s arms and dunk one another repeatedly. As the dream ends, McQueen runs to the water to make it a reality. McGraw runs after him. The scene cuts away as the dream becomes a reality. They are next seen at their house where McGraw slowly strips away her wet white blouse.

Memorable films set on or by the sea often fails to have any decent wetlook. Jaws (1975) have virtually no wet clothing scenes. The best shot of a woman in the water is the naked bather who becomes the shark’s first victim as the movie opens. If you look closely during one panicked dash for the beach scene a few extras are in their clothes in the water, but blink and you will miss it. Jaws are a great film. Its sequels are all rubbish, but as they get worse, the wetlook level seems to increase. Jaws Two (1978) mostly features teenagers, who are trapped on a crippled, becalmed flotilla of small boats as the new shark picks them off one by one. Several get wet swimming desperately from one sinking boat to another. Jaws 3-3D (1983) have perhaps the best wetlook coverage of the series. Bess Armstrong wades around in a vet’s lab coat tending to a poorly baby shark in one scene. Later, the shark attacks a marine park and shattered underwater-tunnels flood, with several people trapped by the rising waters.

The last film, Jaws- The Revenge, (1987) has the most ludicrous premise of all, namely that the ghost of the shark in the first film is actually hunting tats killer’s family for revenge. The finale has the heroine, Lorraine Gary, who was in the first film, killing the shark by impaling it on the bow mast of her sinking boat as she dives into the sea in her white jeans and swims to safety. As she does so, up pops a man we clearly saw being eaten alive earlier in the film, but now he is perfectly all right. Oh, what a happy ending.

Jaws was based on a novel by Peter Benchley, who also wrote another book that led to a very well publicised wetlook scene, The Deep. (1977) The film features early scenes with actress Jacqueline Bissett swimming underwater in a wet tee shirt. The images of her erect nipples in publicity material attracted some serious media attention. The film was watchable but also instantly forgettable.

1975 was also the year in which the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out. With a budget that barely improved on the theatre shows of its early years, the swimming pool scene comes as a great and delightful surprise. The cast nearly all end up indulging in an orgy in and under water in the pool, in Basques and suspenders 9even the men). As they swim and cavort they sing Don’t Dream it. Be it.’ One of the cazvorters, Susan Sarendon, would go on to Hollywood fame and fortune as an Oscar wining actress of tremendous calibre.

David Cronenberg, the master of dark twisted drama, gave us two horror movies in the 70’s with strong wetlook scenes. Shivers in 1975 are a revolting tale of slug like parasites that turn people into sex maniacs. The finale tackles place around and in a hotel pool where the hero is pushed in with a whole bunch of male and female, mostly clothed infected people, who virtually rape him. The last scene has everyone infected driving out of the hotel car park to take his or her infection around the World. It is the ultimate STD warning movie. Sex turns you into a zombie, it says. Rabid, made in 1977 by the same director, features a very busty Marylyn Chambers who is infected with vampire like tendencies by a mad plastic surgeon. In one lusty sequence, Chambers, still fully clothed in a transparency friendly white top, steps into a Jacuzzi type pool to bite and seduce another woman.

A real oddity of a film but with some memorable wet and messy scenes was Tommy, made in 1975, and inspired by the rock musical concept album by rock giants, The Who. The very surreal film has several worthy wet scenes, but it is best remembered for Anne Margaret getting covered from head to foot in baked beans, chocolate and washing up liquid. Her slinky outfit ends up virtually plastered to her as she rolls around in the slop. Apparently, during filming of this, she cut herself on some broken glass, and had to be taken to hospital still soaked to the skin in chocolate. The film has a few other water-based scenes that are easily overshadowed by that one image of beans. Anne Margaret is baptised in the sea in a red dress by her son, who has just declared himself the new messiah. She is stripped of her jewellery and dunked right beneath the waves, surfacing in total saturation. She also skinny dips with Robert Powell at the start of the film, and swims in a pool wearing a one-piece swimming costume with a dress like flowery frill around her bottom.

A spoof disaster movie from 1975, The Big Bus, gets my award for the most unexpected and unlikely wetlook scene. A stewardess on a giant bus that cannot stop due to sabotaged brakes, finds herself trapped in a vending machine room as the machines burst and flood the room in coke cola, orange juice, etc until she is rescued as the sugar and syrup water rise up to her neck.

Three Star Trek films do have wetlook scenes. In Star Trek Four – The Voyage Home, the crew and a woman who has travelled from earth ion our own time, swim around trying to rescue two trapped whales on the sinking spaceship. The crew are still in the water having fun to celebrate their success when a rescue ship arrives for them. Star trek – Generations, the crew of the Enterprise are playing pirates in a holodeck simulation when Data kicks the lovely Doctor Beverley Crusher into the sea in her pirate outfit. She is not very happy with his efforts to understand humour. In Star Trek Nine – Insurrection, Picard and Data save a woman from drowning when she ends up in a lake in her pretty white dress. As she is immortal they wonder why she hasn’t had time to learn how to swim.

The Star Wars saga is sadly lacking in wetlook. The nearest it gets is the sight of Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in the watery trash compacter scene in Star wars (Episode Four – A New Hope) 1977, but the cameras barely glance at her in her white dress. One of the best SF films for wetlook came the year before, (1976). Logan’s Run sees Jenny Agattur in a very sexy green nylon mini dress that is as sexy as Hell even dry. She escapes from a totalitarian regimen that kills anyone over 30 by swimming out with Michael York (Logan) to a pollution ravaged New York State whither mistake for a state of freedom and not just a wilderness. On the way, they end up in an ice-cave where they take of f their wet clothes giving Agattur a chance to show fleeting displays of nudity. Later the couple find a river and as they are now warm they swim, with Agattur in her dress at first before skinny-dipping later. The couple then wade across the Potomac River, coming back the same way with an old man in their company (Peter Ustinov). Agattur and York swim their way back into their own city to prove that life goes on after thirty. The sheer glamour of the outfits women wear in this makes the wetlook almost superfluous until it happens.

Superman and Superman 2 (1980) both feature terrific wetlook moments. The scene in the first film in which Valerie Perrine swims to The Man Of Steel’s rescue lamenting that she never meets the right kind of man is very touching. Her slinky short and very wet dress is wonderful too. The sequel from the same year gives Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane a wet scene of her own. Realising that Clark Kent might be Superman, she tries to force him to rescue her by jumping into Niagara Falls. With too many people watching for him to change into Superman, Clark has to rescue her in his human form, and ends up falling into the water with her in a desperate effort to maintain his secret identity (which she soon discovers anyway). Making of features in documentaries show the scene in close detail, focussing on how Kidder and her stunt double kept swapping places in the water to complete the dangerous shots.

In 1986, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren appeared in The Mosquito Coast about a man driven mad as his efforts to escape the rat race ail. The idyllic jungle and riverside settings allow for Mirren to get wet several times, as her husband loses his mind, and eventually, his life.

A guilty pleasure for me is Big Trouble In Little China (1986) in which many of the characters, including the gorgeous Kim Catrell (later to appear in sex And The City) escape from Chinese Martial Arts practicing demon kings by swimming through deep sewers.

The Princess Bride (1087) has what I consider the funniest fantasy wetlook moment. The Bride escapes her kidnappers by leaping into the sea in her red dress, only to be casually told about the screaming eels that infest the area. As she considers this a bluff, she hears the screams from said eels and swims back to her captors just in time.

Princess Mononoke (1997) is a rarity, in that it animation with a sublime wetlook sequence. The Princess swims the wounded hero to an island where the god of the forests will heal him. The realistic motion of water and the way the clothes on the princess respond floatingly is superb.

In 1999’s Dogma, a woman is told that she is carrying the new virgin birth messiah and that she is descended from Christ. She runs in distress and throws herself into a shallow river to cry. The Angel Gabriel (Alan Rickman) sweet-talks her into calming down. It’s a lovely emotional scene in an otherwise riotous comedy.

Constantine (2005) is absurd hokum and badly acted, not to mention badly cast with Keanu Reeves playing a comic strip hero modelled on singer Sting). It has some fabulous wetlook though. Rachel Weiss ends up dragged into a swimming pool for a spectacular fight with the forces of evil as she wears a white top. Earlier in the film she had to submerge herself in a bathtub full of water in the same clothes to receive a vision of Hell. As her fight ends, Tilda Swindon, as a deranged Angel Gabriel turned evil also ends up in the pool even relishing how the water comforts away the pain where her wings have been torn off.

Superman Returns (2006) has two wet scenes of note. In one, Lois Lane, the rather wooden Kate Bosworth, is rescued from a flooded compartment on board a rapidly sinking yang. Shortly afterwards she returns the favour by diving into the sea o rescue Superman who has been poisoned with Kryptonite and thrown into the water.

The other big expected wetlook event of the year was to prove disappointing (though great in general as a film). Pirates Of The Caribbean – Davy Jones’s locker has Keira Knightly having just a single sword fight in the shallow surf of a Caribbean Island sea. She does not get particularly wet. That is al we get. The first film, Pirates Of The Caribbean – Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003) had lots of wetlook for her. In one scene, she faints, falls off a cliff into the sea, and gets rescued by Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow character who cuts off the corset that has restricted her breathing in the first place. Later, she wade-swims through a deep rock pool with Orlando Bloom to escape from Jeffrey Rush’s Barbossa character. Captured, she son ends up walking the plank and swimming to a desert island. Hopefully, the third film will reintroduce strong wetlook elements.

BOLLYWOOD

Hindi films frequently feature spectacular dances in the rain, and their heroines going for a swim in colourful saris. The reason for this is that in Hinduism, rain is seen as a way of blessing, and cleansing the soul. Many Hindus believe that the wetter they can get in a monsoon, the more God loves them. It is a far better way to react to water from the sky than putting up umbrellas and running for shelter. Water washes over sexuality and purifies it with love for Hindus. An annual festival, called Holi, is celebrated in India with everyone throwing and pouring water over one another. If you stay dry through that, God hates you.

TELEVISION

Few shows on television feature wetlook storylines on a regular basis. Programmes set around water were often the most likely to feature wet women sooner or later, so I would always tune in for episodes of Flipper, Seaquest DSV, etc. Most weeks I would be surprisingly disappointed.

In some novelty quiz and variety shows it has become common to have losing contestants and practical joke stooges dunked in water or covered in gunge. Noel’s House party was a regular gunge fest.

The best such wet and slime fests were actually made for children, with shows lie The Wetter The Better, where kids got to throw water over their school –teachers. The best of all wet-TV shows was Tiswas, a Saturday morning show that had the presenters throwing custard pies, water and just about anything revolting at one another, the kids in the audience, and special guests. One presenter, the lovely Sally James, was regularly left wearing a wet tee shirt, which gained the show a strong male adult audience. The presenters even recorded as Song called The Bucket Of Water Song, as The Four Bucketeers, which has become a wetlook enthusiasts’ anthem.

Gunge shows really date back to the US comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In where the girls often ended up getting covered in water or paint. Judy Carne even had a wetlook catchphrase, with her tendency to whisper in hip, swinging sultry tones, Sock it to me’ at which point the other performers would sock her one with water or gunge.

Some shows have occasional wetlook moments.

Salvage One, a short-lived adventure series, featured a rescue and salvage crew who in one episode, end up trying to save a girl in an earthquake-damaged hotel. They are trapped in a flooded cellar and the main female lead wears tight fitting wet jeans throughout.

In The Chimes Of Big Ben episode of The Prisoner from the late 1960’s features Patrick McGoohan escaping with a treacherous woman who will eventually betray him. Together they swim for cover when their escape boat is attacked. They spend some time on the beach ion their wet clothes.

Police Woman, starring Angie Dickenson had a few wetlook scenes as the undercover policewoman escaped from a boat full of crooks as her allies close in to make arrests or shoot everyone. One such scene even made the opening credit sequences for a few seasons, which meant that it could be watched more often.

Other feisty feminine heroines got wet on occasion to boost their ratings. The Bionic Woman, played by Lindsey Wagner, took several plunges into the waters. The ever changing female cast members in Charlie’s Angels were frequently criticised for getting wet to show of their assists, but in fact it happened in less episodes than many people think.

Some shows seemed to deliberately avoid showing wetlook. It is possible that the extent to which it had become noticeably sexy to depict women in wet clothing meant that showing girls swimming about in frocks and jeans would upset the censors. In Wonder Woman, Linda Carter would run around in a red low cut top and Star-Spangled Banner shorts, but if she had to get wet by swimming, she would magically twirl around until she was wearing a blue wetsuit.

The ever-popular Doctor Who TV series has sometimes involved wetlook.

In the Third Doctor, (John Pertwee) era adventure, Carnival Of Monsters, Jo Grant (Katy Manniing) is trapped up to her waist in a watery bog while being chased by Drashigs (giant carnivorous caterpillar creatures).

In the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) years, assistant Leela, (Louis Jameson) gets wet in scene that gave her a bad cold. In The Talons Of Wein Chieng. She is chased through the sewers by a giant rat while she wears a nightgown, which goes very translucent. When she falls over in the water.

The Sixth Doctor, (Colin Baker), in the epic scaled Trial Of A Time Lord, goes mad and tortures one of his own assistants, Peri (Nicola Bryant) by leaving her tied to a rock while the tide comes in, but the scene does not go on for long. Earlier in the same story, Peri wades ashore in her pants when the TARDIS lands in the Sea.

The 7^th Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, had two assistants, who got wet, one off them more often than any other. His first assistant, Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford0 only gets wet once, swimming in a hotel pool, despite already knowing that the hotel is full of killer robots). She is wearing a swimsuit that has a frilly dress hem around the waist, and it is no surprise that the robot hiding in the pool tries (unsuccessfully) to kill her.

McCoy’s second assistant, Ace, Sophie Aldred, became a wetlook icon for getting soaked in three separate adventures. Her first soaking almost got the actress killed. In Battlefield, she is trapped in a glass chamber that fills with water. Aldred did the stunt work herself, which went wrong when the glass chamber began to break. Aldred was in genuine danger of being cut by glass or electrocuted if the water hit the electrics surrounding the tank. She was dragged from her water-chamber just in time. The incident is captured in making of documentaries associated with the episode.

The scene as it stood was kept in the episode, but looks rather disjointed. Aldred swims out of the chamber into a deep lake and wades ashore carrying Excalibur. She wears her leather jacket and gothic black skirt and bother boots 9her standard outfit for most of her adventures).

Aldred, undeterred by her near tragedy, gets wet again in Silver Nemesis. Chased by Nazis who are fighting Cybermen, she (and the Doctor) jump into a River to avoid being gunned down. They wash up in the shallows and catch their breath before clamouring ashore.

In The dark and creepy tale, The Curse Of Fenric, Aldred is one of three girls to get quite wet. The wartime story features two young ladies who want to swim in the sea. The waters are haunted, and their puritanical guardian (the girls are evacuees) thinks that swimming in swimsuits is evil). After a dip in normal swimwear, the girls sneak out to swim in their clothes. They want Ace to join them, but she is afraid of the water. She has good reason for this. The girds in the water are turned into zombies by the dead things below the surface. Later, the girls rise up, slowly, with full display of their wet clothes, and terrorise the seaside community, even killing the woman who denied them the right to swim.

Once the evil entity behind the tragedies is stopped, the waters go safe again, and Aldred takes a swim herself, diving in a lovely 1940’s dress and going under water, before wading ashore with a sense of sheer delight.

There would be no wetlook again in Dr Who until the David Tennant Tenth Doctor’s occupancy of the TARDIS. In his Season One opening story, New Earth, he and assistant Rose, (Billie Piper) are put through a decontamination process that involves thoroughly soaking them and their clothes in a shower in an elevator. Hopefully, there will be more wetlook to come with future adventures for the time traveller’s assistants.

The heroines of Remington Steele, The Girl From Uncle, and Macmillan & Wife were not averse to clothed swimming scenes in their careers.

The Avengers TV series had some terrific wetlook moments, especially the Emma Peel river fight episode You Have Just Been Murdered. The follow up, The New Avengers gave Joanna Lumley some excellent wet scenes too. In Claws, a giant rat is chased through the sewers, and Purdey (Lumley) fights with a man in the murky water. In Complex, Purdey is trapped in a building that kills its occupants. She destroys the computer behind it by setting the sprinklers off soaking herself thoroughly in a sheer dress as she does so. In Emily, a killer’s fingerprint is left on the roof of a car, which is entering a car wash. Purdey climbs onto the car bonnet and gets soaked by the car wash, which shrinks her clothes and gives her a neater haircut. She looks almost inclined to go back for more.

The Star Trek franchise had too little by way of wetlook. The last season of Star Trek The Next Generation had characters mutating into animals. Deana Troi, the ship’s councillor turns into a fish, That something is wrong is detected when she pours water over herself, can’t stop drinking and then she gets into a bath in her uniform. To me that just say he’s a wetlook enthusiast.

Baywatch gave many opportunities for wetlook, as people had to regularly get into difficulties in water for the lifeguards to come tot heir aid, but the show was more inclined to show bikinis than shirts and skirts. Sometimes however, the wetlook could be quite hoot despite the appalling storylines.

The cast of Xena: Warier Princess had quality material to work with in drawing heavily on classical mythology with tongues firmly in cheeks. The main heroines, (played by Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor) were regarded as lesbians, a tease that the show played around with a great deal. In The Black wolf, (season One) Xena hides a woman from an evil pursuer by letting the woman hide under water in her bath, while fully clothed. The poor girl seems to be on the brink of drowning as Xena chats away with the man looking for her. In a season three, episode, The Debt, during a flashback, Xena herself is rescued from pursuit by an ally who makes her do the same thing, giving an idea of where Xena thought of protecting Black Wolf in this way. In Altared States, in season one, Xena teaches Gabrielle how to catch fish by wading into rivers to catch them without using a rod. Season Twos Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, the most blatantly lesbian chic episode shows the girls sharing a bath together, though they are naked and they begin king each other down very affectionately. They also fight a host of female vampires. Several other episodes feature gorgeous wetlook too.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer all to rarely let its heroines get wet. A rare exception episode was Go Fish in which The Sunnydale School swimming team are being fed steroids from Chernobyl that turn them into fish –man hybrid monsters by their coach. Discovered by a school cleaner, the villain pushes her into a flooded cellar with the fish and they eat her. Later, he shoves Buffy in too, and tells her that as they aren’t hungry the fish monsters now only want sex. Buffy, m splashing around in a black tracksuit is rescued by Xander, and they push the coach in. Buffy watches in horror as the fish boys satisfy their lust with the coach.

Desperate Housewives had some amazing wetlook in its first season. In episode one, felicity Hoffmann wants to go to the funeral of the woman who committed suicide as the show began. (possibly the quickest exit for a character in any show). At the funeral party, she is shocked to find that her unruly children have jumped into the swimming pool to play rather than mourning more respectfully. When the three boys refuse to get out of the water, she wades in slowly and rounds them up, before sloshing off home to get her dry. Her long black funeral outfit swirls deliciously, and there are several underwater shots of her in the pool too.

In a later episode, Terri Hatcher’s character is at a cremation and accidentally spills the ashes of the deceased all down herself. A mortal enemy of hers insists on hosing Hatcher’s character down to clean her off, and the hosing scene is quite well handled.

Marcia Cross is knocked into a pool in one episode, but it is a disappointingly short scene.

Lost, a surreal story of plane crash survivors trapped on a mysterious island has some excellent wetlook scenes from time to time. Heavy rain seems to fall on characters that are depressed, so people get soaked at unexpected times. In Season one’s Whatever The Case May Be, the leading lady, Kate, and Island survivor, Sawyer, finds the case referred to in the dreadful pun of a title. They find it at the bottom of a lake, which they have to swim down to fully clothed, giving Evangelina Lolly a chance to show off her sleek physique in a terrific underwater swim sequence.

ADVERTIZING

Wetlook imagery is a powerful advertising weapon. Posters of girls standing in wet clothes, especially tee shirts, are used for countless products. Bounty Bar ads and posters were once often set on tropical islands, so girls romping in the surf were common images. Actress and Model, Carolyn Munro, (later a James Bond Girl) was seen advertising Lamb’s Navy Rum while standing thigh deep in the Caribbean Ocean in revealing damp clothes.

A recent ad for Lynx deodorant depicted a young man dreaming of seeing a girl jump into a fountain to recover his discarded money, As he has used Lynx, his dream comes instantly true.

MUSIC

If you wanted to compile a CD or I Pod collection of tunes with a watery theme for wetlook background effects, here are some pointers.

Richard Wagner’s Opera Das Rhinegold is about the siren like Rhine maidens who swim around in the Rhine and how they are tricked into giving away their gold by an evil dwarf. Few staging has actually used water, but the music is highly evocative.

There are several songs with lyrics alluding to wetlook. Splish Splash is a song by Bobby Darin about a man trying to take a bath while a party goes on around him. Neil Seduce sang about #’walking In The Rain with The One I love’.

There are several excellent wetlook album covers on records. The Mammas And Pappas have an album cover with the band members swimming around in a pool fully dressed, including Mamma Cass Eliot. A classic Stylistics album cover features a woman in a sleek red and glossy wet tee shirt. Olivia Newton John’s Physical album has the singer on the cover wading in the sea in a red dress. Inner sleeve notes provide more wetlook shots of her.

In the 1970’s the BBC called Top Of The Pops issued a whole series of dire but cheap albums of cover versions of pop songs. The albums, designed for bargain basement racks in department stores, often featured sexy women in revealing bikinis or wet tee shirts.

Barbara Striesland is well known for taking a bath with many of her leading men. She even gets wet in her nightie in a film, For Pete’s Sake, (1974) Musically; she recorded an album called Wet.

There is now a growing fashion trend for fake wetlook. This is where people will wear hair jells and clothes that look wet, even though they are quite dry. The increase in interest in surfing and wind-surfing is also influencing high street fashion in towns nowhere near large bodies of water.

MUSIC VIDEO

Many pop videos feature water and clothed girls in water at that. Here are some classic examples.

Madonna’s Cherish is probably the best. Madge, sis she is known to media pundits, rolls around on the beach and lets the waves crash over her dark dress, and up between her thighs, as mermaid men and a little girl watch her. Filmed in very high definition black and white.

Texas recorded When we Are Together and added a video with their lead singer splashing around n a swimming pool in jeans and a red shirt for its entire duration, As the video progresses, the band’s fans jump in fully clothed and caress one another around her.

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers recorded a song called Don’t Come Around Here No More and filmed an Alice In Wonderland video for it which briefly depicts Alice in her blue and white dress drowning in the Mad Hatter’s cup of tea.

Ozzy Osborne has a video for his song, No More Tears, in which a woman in a red dress sits crying so much that her room fills with water, around her.

P J Harvey sings down by the water in a video in which she swims up and down in a pool in a very sexy red dress, but we never see a shot of her on the surface. The whole thing is filmed underwater.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds secured the support of Kylie Minogie for their haunting and beautiful Mary Claire song and video, which is about a girl murdered and dumped in a river. Kylie sings the song from the water, floating in an Ophelia style pose.

Most pop videos jump cut and fast edit too quickly, with images barely on screen for more than a few near subliminal seconds. It is frustrating when wetlook imagery is treated in such a fashion too. I want images to savour and cherish, rather than teasers for something I can’t hold on to.

BORN AGAIN BAPTISM CEREMONIES

Wetlook can be found in many unexpected walks of life. Born Again Christians often convert public ally with baptism ceremonies involving full emersion under water, often wearing their finest church clothes.

WET-TEE-SHIRT CONTESTS

The most banal end of the wetlook erotica arena is the wet tee-shirt contest.

Men have long since noticed that a girl’s nipples will expand a lot if cold water is applied to them. Men also notice that a wet white tee shirt goes extremely transparent. To all intents and purposes, a braless girl in a wet tee shirt might as well be just plain topless. Wet tee shirt contests celebrate and exploit these phenomena. In many bars, girls compete for the cashes prizes on offer to the best-wet tee shirt presentation of a given event.

The contest is often crude in oats simplicity. The girls will wear a tee shirt, often torn down so that it barely covers their breasts, and which can be quickly ripped away completely. In most contests of this kind the girls will wear only bikini briefs or their knickers in addition to the tee shirts. As they go on to the stage someone pours ice-cold water over the girl, or she will walk under a shower spray and make she wet as she dances like a nightclub stripper. The girl will show how hard and large her nipples look under the tee shirt and then she may rip away the shirt to show the unfettered breasts in all their glory. Such contests are actually dull and unimaginative events, attended by loud, brash louts hyped up on cheap lager. The routine that the girls go through rarely various. A few may try for extra points by flashing bare buttocks or even their vaginas at the baying audiences, The tee-shirt is almost irrelevant. The lads who attend such events would be happier with complete nudity. .

FOAM PARTIES AND SWIMMING POOL PARTIES

Many people have now found tatty can hire swimming pools for private parties, which will allow them and their guests to swim in their clothes as they will rarely get to do at public swimming baths. Poll parties allow for discos and poolside buffet food to be served, and more and more pools are cottoning on tot his business.

In some nightclubs, soaking wet dancers are a regular cabaret act. The American Film Coyote Ugly, in which female bar staff dance on the bars as their colleagues soak them in beer and water is actually a real bar, and many other US bars encourage staff or even customers to get wet before or during a dance routine.

In some clubs, a major feature is the turning on of sprinkler like shower sprays to hose down dancers. Care has to be taken to avoid anyone being electrocuted of course. Safer by far is the foam party in which a dance floor is saturated in deep soapsuds, which dancers throw around, and splash all over one another. In some towns it is possible to see the soaking wet, and rather drunken revellers walking to their buses and taxis still soaked to the skin, but usually very happy with themselves.

THE INTERNET AND WAM COMMUNITIES.

The World Wide wet, as Wammers call it, has drawn many wetlook enthusiasts together as a single community. Video footage, photographs and testimonials to the joys of wetlook abound on the net. Some firms, like the excellent Minx Movies produce long wetlook videos in which women act out a variety of wetlook fantasies in the whole range of outfits. In some cases the women stay dressed. In others, they slowly peel away layers of clothes until close to, or completely naked.

For many, wetlook has become integrated into the Umbrella fetish world of WAM, (Wet and Messy. Wetlook enthusiasts are pigeon holed in with people who like girls covered in food substances, (beans, peas, etc), girls who rolling mud, smother their flesh and clothes in paint, like the idea of getting stuck in quicksand, etc. It is not a club that all wetlook enthusiasts appreciate.

The most extreme WAM is the Golden Shower. This is for people who like soaking themselves and others in urine, or even with excrement, which many, myself included, find simply revolting. Most WAM websites have little time for GS aficionados.

The wet-net is a great place to ask ho got wet in what film or show. Someone always knows. Many often-unauthorised film clips from the wet scenes in some shows are available for purchase or download online.

With some wet sites clocking up 12,000 or more visitors, the minority wetlook fetish scene is actually quite a large one. I for one can only hope that it’s a tide, which will never ebb. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a swim. .

My thanks to Roger Carpenter, or Artscene Aquatics for invaluable criticism and feedback on this essay. http://www.artaqua.co.uk/

WETLOOK DEFENSE – Article defending fully clothed swimming fetishism against Puritans who also dislike too little being worn by swimmers. WETLOOK SWIMMING STROKES - The best ways to swim in your clothes WETLOOK VARIATIONS - The variety of ways to experiment in getting your clothing wet whilst still wearing it. (Erotica) WETLOOK - Why I love it.

My erotica in general http://www.arthurchappell.clara.net/contents8erotica.htm

RELATED PAGES (INDEPENDENT FROM MY WORK)

http://www.arthurchappell.clara.net/wetlookdefence.htm Arguements in favour of wetlook
http://www.arthurchappell.clara.net/wetlookswimmingstrokes.htm The practricalities of wetlook