DAY 31: THE LA PERLA "GRIGIOPERLA' SWIM SHORTS
as seen in Casino Royale (2006).
The beach tends to be a more revealing place than the bedroom in Bond films. For a franchise so loaded with sex and innuendo, there is a stunning lack of lingerie to be found. Perhaps for commercial reasons, Bond girls tend to be wrapped in gowns rather than corsets when they’re anywhere near a bed. At the waterside, however – and indeed, in the water – things get a bit more risque.
La Perla has dressed several of the series’ most memorable women. Natalya Simonova wore a white La Perla bikini in GoldenEye. Solange Dimitrios wore a green one as she rode onto the screen on a stunning white horse. And Jinx recalled Honey Ryder’s legendary bikini in an orange number of her own. But there’s no Bond girl more famous for wearing La Perla than James Bond himself, emerging from the Caribbean surf in Casino Royale.
Tiny and tight, Daniel Craig’s little blue shorts were as skimpy as men’s swimwear could be without being briefs. And they created a media sensation. Daniel Craig wasn’t unaware of what he’d done. Though the moment wasn’t scripted – he was meant to swim through the surf, but a high sandbar made it difficult, so he stood – he knew the parallel he was drawing. "As I did it, I went, 'Oh f–,'" he said. "I knew.” What he didn’t realise was how enduring the scene would be, having no idea he’d be "haunted by it for the rest of my life." Film critics and the public were largely complimentary, though it prompted Nigel Andrews, a film critic from the Financial Times, to brand Craig a “bimbo-turned-himbo.”
The scene positioned Bond as Bond Girl: a theme that would, like a thread, run through the film and through his entire run until he meets, tragically, with the statistically likely fate of a Bond Girl. It was a theme inextricably linked with water as a metaphor for rebirth, and in Casino Royale, Bond was being reborn as an object of the female gaze. In a franchise struggling with surviving in an era increasingly unforgiving of the sexualisation of women onscreen, there seemed an obvious answer to costume designer Lindy Hemming: sexualise Bond instead. "I knew that he would look really sexy in [the shorts]. Why should it always be the girls in bikinis?! I meant it to be like that. It's a joke between us all that there is often someone coming out of the sea in a Bond film and I said 'Well, if someone's coming out of the sea, they have to look as sexy as Ursula Andress.'"
The shorts proved a commercial sensation as well as a cultural one, with many men chasing the chance to look like James Bond. But they provided a happy middle ground, too, between shorts (often large and too baggy) and briefs (often seen as uncool). Shops sold out, and even six years later, the New York Times was quipping, “More men are taking a size 007.” The actual shorts used in the film fetched £44,450 when Daniel Craig auctioned them off for charity in 2012.
In an interview with Graham Norton, Judi Dench revealed she was the one to bang the gavel on Craig's pants.
Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007, The South Bank Show, BBC News, Graham Norton, The New York Times, The Financial Times.
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