Wet T-shirt contest

Contestants typically take turns dancing or posing before the audience, with the outcome decided either by crowd reaction or by judges' vote. In racier contests, participants may tear or crop their T-shirts to expose their midriffs, cleavage, or the undersides of their breasts. Depending on local laws, participants may be allowed to remove their T-shirts or strip completely naked during their performance.

History

Wet T-shirt contests first appeared in the 1970s in the United States. Filmmaker Dick Barrymore claims in his memoir Breaking Even to have held the first wet T-shirt contest at Sun Valley, Idaho's Boiler Room Bar in January 1971, as part of a promotion for K2 skis. The contest was promoted as a simple "T-shirt contest" in which airline stewardesses would dance to music wearing K2 promotional T-shirts. However, the first contestant to appear was a professional stripper who danced topless and the amateur contestants responded by drenching their T-shirts before competing. Barrymore held a second "K2 Wet T-Shirt Contest" in the Rusty Nail at Stowe Mountain Resort, Vermont in order to film it, despite the fact that Stowe City Council had passed a resolution banning nudity at the event. He held another promotional contest for K2 on 10 March 1971 at Aspen, Colorado's The Red Onion restaurant and bar, and the contests were featured in a pictorial in the March 1972 issue of Playboy.

The first known mention of the term wet T-shirt contest in the press occurred in 1975 in The Palm Beach Post, describing the contest's appearance at New Orleans discotheques. The contest subsequently became established at spring break events in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with some bar owners being fined under public indecency laws for holding one. Despite a lack of clarity as to their legal status, contests began to take place elsewhere in the United States. A contest in a Milwaukee tavern in 1976 was subject to a police raid, despite contestants wearing Scotch Tape under their T-shirts as required by the police.

Jacqueline Bisset's appearance in the 1977 film The Deep, where she swam underwater wearing only a T-shirt for a top, helped to bring the wet T-shirt contest to broader public awareness. On Frank Zappa's 1979 album Joe's Garage the track "Fembot in a Wet T-Shirt" tells of Mary from Canoga Park who takes part in a wet T-shirt contest in order to raise money to return home after being abandoned by a rock group in Miami.

By the 1990s wet T-shirt contests had become common at spring break celebrations, for example in Miami and Mexico. The 2003 American reality film The Real Cancun included a wet T-shirt contest. In the 21st century the organisers of wet T-shirt contests often ban the audience from taking photographs as the combination of smartphone cameras and social media can cause problems for contestants, such as the loss of their jobs.

Nevertheless, by the mid-2010s wet T-shirt contests were on the decline in the United States and they are often seen as outdated. For example, Leverett House at Harvard University suspended its annual wet-T shirt contest following protests from Radcliffe College students and alumnae, who denounced the "archaic and barbaric" practice as out-of-touch and dehumanizing.

These contests find resistance beyond the United States as well. In South Africa, for example, local businesses and officials in Plettenberg Bay have clashed with students and festival organizers over this "disgraceful" behavior.