Let me begin at the pinnacle. I was 12, on a four-star package holiday with my parents and younger sister in Halkidiki. I didn’t realise. No one alerted me. The occasion should have been marked. Someone ought – at the very least – to have thrown a tickertape fiesta featuring the local mayor presenting me with a certificate inscribed: ‘You, Vanessa Jane Feltz, did on 17 August, 1974, reach the world’s required standard in curvaceous, non-cellulite-riddled, firm-thighed, high-breasted, flat-stomached, deckchair-adorning perfection.’
The Feltz family should, for one fabulous foray, have abandoned the grim pre-paid hotel half-board buffet and splashed out on celebratory moussakas at the taverna down the road, toasting my never-to-be-equalled swimwear slam dunk with diluted ouzo. Alas, my mother, disgruntled by the lustful looks directed at her pre-teenage daughter from waiters – and Vassilis, who offered me free rides in his water-ski boat – hastened to draw a veil over my Lolita fortnight. Literally. She kept flinging oversized T-shirts and gigantic towels at me, barking, ‘For heaven’s sake Vanessa, cover yourself up. There’s no need to parade yourself about the place.’
Parade? In a basic C&A pale-blue bikini and flip-flops? She was shaming me, but I didn’t know why. I share with you the photo she snapped. (I think the splodges might be squashed mosquitos.) She borrowed that lace cover-up from her own mother, making me wear it for the picture. Look carefully and you can make out the beginnings of bulginess about my thighs, but I permit it to be reproduced because it is the only surviving proof that, once in my 63 years, I did pass muster in a cossie.
Vanessa Feltz, aged 12, on holiday in Greece
The five decades since have been a slippery slide down the snake of swimwear shame. My boobs burgeoned so riotously that no high-street bikini brand could contain them. How I yearned for one of those wispy, tie-at-the-hip, macramé-style string affairs. Other 14-year-olds wriggled and giggled in the surf, barely bouncing in their tiny filaments of fabric. I needed cantilevered construction, reinforced Lycra and underwiring.
In the 70s, ‘quality’ swimwear cost the earth. It resided solely in the hallowed, hushed halls of Harrods’ cruisewear department, Dickins & Jones’s designer gallery or the late, lamented Franks of Golders Green.
If you couldn’t squeeze into Marks & Spencer or Chelsea Girl you were condemned to fork out for Gottex or Gideon Oberson. A matching one-piece and cover-up would set you back more than the total cost of a week’s self-catering holiday in Lanzarote. Even worse, togged out in the ensemble, you looked exactly like your Grandma Sybil, only lumpier. For the voluptuous female, simply acquiring a dunkable garment to encase your curves meant knocking back a toxic cocktail of bankruptcy and embarrassment.
Remember, this was BK: before Kardashian. The correct answer to, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ was, ‘Good lord, no!’ Love Island-esque surgically enhanced billowing buttocks bisected by a pipe-cleaner of furled fabric had not yet been deemed the acme of poolside glamour.
No wonder any woman over a size 14 headed sand-wards in an all-enveloping kaftan and refused to take it off until she was safely back home in Beaconsfield.
By the 80s, women of my vintage, with the rare exception of those genetically blessed Jennifer Aniston-types, were permanently embroiled in a quest to unearth the holy grail of swimwear. The ideal, described alluringly by advertising copywriters, was a costume simultaneously ‘flattering’ and ‘controlling’. Did we want to be flattered and controlled by our swimwear? Oh my goodness, yes – we positively longed to be.
In those pre-online shopping days, we pounded the pavements in pursuit of the perfect garment, one magically engineered to render our posteriors pertly spherical, our stomachs tautly tempting and our bosoms perkily north-pointing. It also had to lengthen our legs, cinch our waists and eliminate back-fat, all without even a hint of camel toe.
Every summer the nation’s gallant fashion editors provided desperate readers with a cavalcade of costumes ‘guaranteed’ to conceal our flaws and magnify our assets. We’d save up, trek out to the shops and – keeping our panties on underneath for reasons of hygiene – heave our pallid flesh into said swimwear. The disappointment when we confronted our puckered knees and upper arm flab in the greenish-hued changing-room mirror left indelible stains on our self-esteem.
I got married, gave birth to two delightful daughters and became the country’s second most famous fat person after Dawn French. Swimwear was foe not friend. Frankly, I should have taken up skiing. Paparazzi lurked behind palm trees eager for a juicy shot of my stretch-marked bottom seeping out of a size 20 one-piece. And they got it.
When my little girls noticed their mother’s behind plastered over the cover of a magazine (headline: ‘Oh Vanessa no!’) they hid all the copies in our local newsagent to spare my feelings. There’s a direct link to the gastric band I had fitted in 2010 and the gastric bypass I endured in 2019 when the band embedded itself in my liver. It had to be removed and my bariatric surgeon said, ‘Vanessa, have a bypass at the same time. If you don’t, you’ll regain all the weight you’ve lost and then some. You’ll be heavier and older and when you finally ask for a bypass the operation will be more difficult.’ Note: my timing sucked. If I’d hung in for a few more years I’d have been bang on the Ozempic and living skinnily ever after.
Vanessa, aged 57, on holiday in 2019
So now I’m a consistent size 12, how do I feel about sashaying down the beach in the cream of 2025’s swimwear? The answer is ‘nauseous’. There’s less of me to contain but what is left has lost exuberance and looks like a burst balloon encased in a pair of saggy tights. How lucky am I to be working seven days a week – Vanessa on Channel 5 every weekday lunchtime and LBC shows Saturday and Sunday from 3pm to 6pm – with no holiday in sight?
This year, my summer will be fully clothed, schlepping to the studio on the Jubilee line, miles from pedalos, jet-skis and prying eyes. Olé!
