The same question comes back every summer, like a stubborn mosquito in an overheated room: which swimsuits should one invest in for 2026? Invest, really. As if the bikini had become a safe haven asset, wedged somewhere between gold and government bonds, ready to withstand economic storms and Instagram tides.

This season, we’re told, silhouettes are diving headfirst into the 1990s. An era now recycled with all the subtlety of a slogan on steroids. Sacred relics are unearthed: the logo bikini spotted at Chanel in 1992, elevated to the status of a civilizational artifact, as though two interlocking letters could somehow justify the entire existence of a scrap of Lycra.

Then there’s the high-cut silhouette. Ever higher, ever bolder, flirting with textile abstraction. A direct inheritance from Pamela Anderson in Alerte à Malibu, this cut now seems to answer a kind of mystical quest: how far can a garment disappear while still claiming to exist? Minimalism here is no longer an aesthetic, it’s an extreme sport.

Meanwhile, the so-called “effortless” styles — that magic word meaning “very expensive to look like you didn’t try” — continue to reign. Effortless chic? It mostly requires a well-trained wallet.

But the real centerpiece is the resurrection of logomania. In the 1990s, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell strutted in logo-stamped micro-bikinis, turning their bodies into elegant, high-impact billboards. Today, the trend is back, we’re told, “more discreet.” Translation: the logo may be smaller, but the price has grown.

And so beachwear goes: an endless tide where each wave claims to be new, while merely washing ashore the same shells sold the previous season. Nostalgia, neatly packaged; modernity, generously priced; and consumers, delighted to pay for the chance to relive a past they sometimes never even experienced.

FM