There is a specific kind of confidence embedded in 1970s resort wear that contemporary fashion keeps trying to reverse-engineer. You see it in the Missoni cover-ups showing up at Art Basel Miami, in the wide-leg palazzo pants at every rooftop pool from Tulum to Mykonos. The original, though, was forged somewhere between a sun-drenched terrace at The Beverly Hills Hotel and the pool deck of the Dorado Beach resort in Puerto Rico — and it looked nothing like a trend. It looked like a lifestyle that had been lived in.
The Hotels That Built the Aesthetic
The early 1970s luxury resort circuit was its own creative ecosystem. Properties like the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, the Boca Raton Resort, and Club Med’s Guadeloupe outpost attracted a clientele — film producers, Formula 1 drivers, European aristocrats, Latin American industrialists — who dressed for the pool the way previous generations dressed for the opera. The look that emerged was distinctly anti-minimalist: bold botanical and geometric prints on fluid fabrics, often in silk or the era’s newly refined polyester jerseys that actually draped well in heat. Cover-ups were a genuine category, not an afterthought. Caftan culture was at its peak, driven in part by designers like Emilio Pucci, who had essentially invented the luxury resort wear market a decade earlier and was now seeing his signature optical prints copied across every hotel boutique in the Caribbean.
Lilly Pulitzer was doing something parallel but distinctly American — her cotton shift prints spoke to the Palm Beach crowd, where the aesthetic was less Euro-jet-set and more old Florida money: faded, irreverent, rooted in citrus groves. Both strands fed what became the defining visual grammar of tropical luxury dressing in this era.
Fabric, Silhouette, and the Politics of Ease
What made 1970s resort wear technically interesting was the silhouette logic. Everything was cut for movement — high-waisted bikini bottoms paired with billowing overshirts, sarong wraps tied at the hip over tank-strap one-pieces, wide-brimmed straw hats that were actually structural rather than decorative. The era’s obsession with natural fibers intersected with a new casualness about the body. Second-wave feminism had shifted what it meant to be comfortable in public, and resort wear absorbed that shift in real time. Women were wearing less coverage at the pool not because fashion demanded it, but because the cultural permission had finally arrived.
Men’s resort dressing in this period also deserves more credit than it gets. The matching shirt-and-short sets — what we’d now call a camp collar co-ord — were everywhere. Halston, Willi Smith, and Giorgio Sant’Angelo were all producing pieces that blurred the line between poolside and evening in ways that felt genuinely radical at the time.
The color palette was saturated but not garish: terracotta, deep turquoise, banana yellow, coral. These were colors calibrated for natural light at the equator, colors that photographed well against chlorinated water and bleached concrete. Instagram didn’t exist, but the visual intelligence behind the choices was exactly the same.
Why It Still Reads
Contemporary designers — Jonathan Anderson at Loewe, Maximilian Davis at Ferragamo, and the entire cottage industry of independent resortwear labels working out of Miami and Lisbon — are all pulling directly from this well. The silhouettes are looser, the prints are slightly more restrained, but the underlying philosophy is identical: clothing that functions as an argument for being somewhere beautiful and having the good sense to dress accordingly.
The 1970s resort aesthetic endures because it was never really about fashion. It was about a particular relationship with leisure — deliberate, unapologetic, visually considered. That proposition doesn’t age.
The beach has always been where people go to be their most honest. The 1970s just figured out how to dress for it. — Jordan Vale
