At the end of Splash!, the Design Museum’s new exhibition on “a century of swimming and style”, there’s a film about the haenyeo – women on the South Korean island of Jeju who for centuries have been diving for seafood and seaweed at depths up to 20 metres, holding their breath for up to three minutes, in almost all temperatures. It is seen through the eyes of a diver who has decided to follow her mother into this arduous and dangerous work because, she says, “if you dive you don’t feel depressed… There’s no time to overthink everything.”
It’s an arresting 11 minutes of footage, giving a powerful sense of what is to be in water, the more so because it follows a jaunty parade of folly and fun, as well as some courage and some creepiness. The show is curated by Amber Butchart, the dress and design historian, who was raised in the Suffolk coastal town of Lowestoft and now lives in Margate, and who is best known for her appearances on BBC One’s The Great British Sewing Bee, along with Tiya Dahyabhai of the Design Museum. Splash! aims to explore “swimming’s role in modern life” from the 1920s, when beach holidays and their associated outfits became more about active swimming than about passive bathing, to the present day.
