Woman on Top

By Patricia B. Dwyer

The Pacific has a reputation for thievery, snatching bikinis from surfing women.
Tired of Deep Blue’s turning her summer surfing sessions into peep shows, Italian designer Amanda Chinchelli Greer took the matter into her own hands.

“I was going on a surf trip to Costa Rica last year and I was super tired of having bikinis fall off,” she says. “All the rash-guards [shirt-shaped surf garments that protect skin from chafing on surfboard wax] out there are so unflattering and uncomfortable, so I designed a couple of suits that worked out in the water.”

A year later, Greer has a San Clemente-based brand of surf-oriented bathing suits, Seea (pronounced “sea-ah,” Greer’s Italian-infused feminization of the word “sea”) being sold on both American coasts as well as in Japan.

In addition to freeing women to worry about nothing but the next wave, the line of bathing suits conjures the 1950s, drawing inspiration from the style of surfing performed on the era’s long, heavy surfboards.

“I think women surfing and longboarding is so beautiful and so stylish,” Greer says. “I wanted to combine them and make a suit that would inspire.”

theseea.com