In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the lifeguard's uniform through the eyes of the design critic
Carlo Ratti on the lifeguard's uniform
For one hundred and fifty-five years, the 'Società Nazionale di Salvamento,' or National Lifesaving Society, has set the guidelines for Italy’s lifeguards. Let us examine them through the eyes of a design critic. First, Italian lifeguards are an essential safeguard. According to estimates, every summer they save tens of thousands of people from drowning: extraordinary numbers that transform what could be a tragic seasonal tally into infinite safe returns home.
But they are also a visual landmark. Let’s forget about Olympic neoprene suits signed by Giorgio Armani! The red tank top – often faded by sun and salt – is, from June to September, a visual anchor planted along Italy’s 8,000-km-long coastline. It is a true piece of living architecture that deserves a few lines of critical attention.
Let us begin with its origins. The International Life Saving Federation recommends yellow for the upper half of lifeguard uniforms and red for the trunks below. Australia and Britain have turned this guideline into a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon standardisation: identical uniforms, defined materials, strict codes, an almost military aesthetic. From Sydney to St Ives, the lifeguard sports a walkie-talkie, a cap, technical sunglasses and zinc oxide on the nose.
Italy, by contrast, with the nonchalance of a country that treats international guidelines as suggestions rather than obligations, continues to dress its lifeguards in deep red, from the neck down to mid-thigh. It is the same red as Tinder, the world’s most downloaded dating app.
On the beach, salvation wears the colour of desire – as Baywatch also taught us. In a country that gave the world Valentino red and Ferrari red, the lifeguard’s tank top belongs to a similar chromatic dynasty, even when bleached by the sun.
The garment is equally defined by freedom. Apart from the identifying lettering, which must be clearly legible on both front and back, Italian regulations specify very little. The design is shaped precisely by this absence of rules.
The uniform thus becomes a blank canvas for individual vanity: low-cut tank tops, salt-faded T-shirts, vintage shorts and movie-star sunglasses. It is not a dogma, but a fashion statement – a uniform worn almost like a trophy which, between the 1970s and the 1980s, from the Riviera Romagnola to the beaches of Versilia, fuelled Italian erotic comedy and the dreams of Northern European tourists.
The lifeguard’s outfit reveals a fundamental tension in every human project: the balance between top-down codification and bottom-up freedom. These are precisely the mechanisms that Bernard Rudofsky placed at the centre of his celebrated twentieth-century studies on vernacular architecture, culminating in the iconic exhibition Architecture Without Architects at MoMA in New York (1964). Again and again, a delicate balance between rules and freedom produces the most fascinating and attractive designs.
So, despite modest pay, exhausting shifts and the inevitable sunburn (an occupational hazard, one might say!), for thousands of Italian eighteen-year-olds the lifeguard certification exam remains an essential rite of passage.
It is an opportunity to combine responsibility and vanity. And, through their uniform, to become the unexpected designers of Italy’s seaside landscape.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.