Another massive promoter and influence on women’s sports participation and fashion was the film industry. Sportswear became the American style, coinciding with the rising popularity and influence of American movies. Celebrities had the power to set trends that spread globally.

The bicycle permitted the freedom to travel and ability to break away from wearing conventional clothing, therefore cycling was directly related to “The New Woman” that was emerging in the 1890s. She was a modern woman who defined her own role in society. Many chose to forgo marriage and child rearing and worked outside the home, or became politically active in women’s  social issues. 

The International Olympics Committee voted in 1910 to introduce swimming events for women. This was significant considering women's swimwear of that time. Since women first started stepping publicly into the water in the mid-nineteenth century, the problem of wet cloth clinging to the female body troubled society. Modesty took precedence over common sense, and the solution was to cover the body in layers- caps, dresses, blouses, skirts, trousers, stockings, shoes, even corsets - all with the hope that the sheer weight of those layers would protect the enveloped body from too curious eyes. The downside of this weight, of course, was that it dropped the body to the bottom like a stone. When women arrived on scene at the Olympics, most had fabricated their own style of racing suit.The English women's 4 X100 meter swim team, pictured here were among the first to adopt the early version of the racing suit.

Despite the fact that nude bathing was illegal, nudism drew a huge audience. Early Hollywood film, The Water Nymph, (1912), by Mack Sennett  featured attractive women scantily dressed who became known as the Bathing Beauties.  It was apparent that sex sells, for the images of these women found their way into many other movies and advertisments. It was this suit that provided the prototype for the standard suit of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Dressing is an important and controllable way to communicate one’s values because it reflects life status and how a person wants to appear in society. When it comes to women and sports fashion however, the image women are trying to portray and the image society perceives of them are often incongruent.