These Swimmers Don’t Care What You Think About Their Crazy Outfits

On the beaches of Miami or Rio, it’s all about showing skin. But on a beach outside Qingdao, China, it’s all about covering up, even if it means looking like a lucha librestar. Swimmers there have become famous, even fashionable, for the funky “facekinis” worn over their heads to complement the colorful swimsuits they wear for protection against the sun and giant jellyfish.

The facekini is just what it sounds like: a headsock, often in colorful patterns, worn over the head to protect one’s face from the sun. They’ve become hugely popular in China, and the world of high fashion embraced them with a spread in CR, the new magazine from former Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld. CR called the masks “a hidden retreat in this season’s swimwear,” but they brought something else to mind for photographer Philipp Engelhorn, who spent a week this summer making a gorgeous series of portraits.

“It’s sorta like Mexican wrestling to me visually,” he says.

That may be, but the people wearing them do not care. They take skin protectionvery seriously, Engelhorn says, and jellyfish stings really hurt. And the masks have taken on something of a fashionable air. You can buy them in local stores for a couple dollars, but swimmers often make their own, along with the full-body swimsuits. The resulting garb often reveals something about the person wearing it.

Engelhorn found photographing the swimmers harder than expected because most were more serious about swimming than posing. And when he did convince someone to stop for a photo, more often than not they wanted to flash the peace sign, which apparently is standard for posed pictures in China. “If you asked them not to flash the peace sign there were like, ‘What do we do now?'” he says. “But that request was actually sort of a good thing because then they started getting into all these creative Chines opera poses with one foot in front of the other, etc.”

At first, Engelhorn considered erecting a mobile studio to make the portraits, but ultimately decided to employ natural light and backgrounds. It turned out to be the right move, he said, because it allowed him a few minutes to chat with each swimmer. Over the course of a week he was approached hundreds of swimmers. He made about 130 portraits. What Engelhorn appreciate the most about the project was the swimmers were not at all self-conscious about their get-ups. They were proud to dress in bathing suits that would draw laughter, if not scorn, anywhere else.

“In Germany if you were to go a beach dressed like this, people would be like, ‘”What the fuck is your problem?'” says Englehorn, who is from Germany but now lives in Hong Kong. “But in Qingdao they were like, ‘This is how we do it, why don’t you do it too?'”