During her years as a high-school basketball star, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir scored a total of three thousand and seventy points, surpassing the previous state high-school record, set by the W.N.B.A. great Rebecca Lobo. At the University of Memphis, Abdul-Qaadir, who is Muslim and African-American, set another benchmark by becoming the first player to compete in N.C.A.A. basketball while wearing a hijab. When she tore her A.C.L., during her freshman year, in 2009, trainers gave her a hydrotherapy regimen: jump squats in the pool, running on an underwater treadmill. Before plunging into the coed pool, which was shared with the football team, she put together an ad-hoc swimsuit that was in keeping with her religious beliefs. She covered her body with athletic running tights, basketball shorts, an athletic bra, a long-sleeved Dri-Fit shirt, a loose, sleeveless jersey, and a hijab. Running on the treadmill was a slow-motion battle; on jump squats, her body whooshed upward as her shorts ballooned with water. “I was in three or four layers of clothes, shorts falling off, my shirt riding up,” she said.
Observant Muslim women have long borne suspicion, judgment, and ire in the West for how they dress themselves, especially when it comes to sports. In October, a high-school cross-country runner in Ohio, Noor Alexandria Abukaram, ran a personal best in the 5K at a district-wide meet, only to be disqualified after the race for wearing a hijab. Abdul-Qaadir gave up the chance to play professionally in Europe because International Basketball Federation rules prohibited the hijab until 2017. Persisting in the face of discrimination, Muslim women in hijabs took medals in tae kwon do, fencing, and weight lifting at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, and they field amateur and youth teams in boxing, volleyball, figure skating, badminton, and soccer. One sport where hijabis are rarely found, however, is swimming—and, of anything a woman of any faith might choose to wear, it is her swimwear that may suffer the most intense scrutiny. Muslim women who wore tunics and leggings to beaches in France in 2016 were fined and even arrested after more than two dozen municipalities, including Cannes and Nice, enacted bans on burkinis—the same mode of modest, often cumbersome swimming attire that Abdul-Qaadir pulled together for her pool workouts.
Many different variations of the burkini—a word trademarked by the Lebanese-Australian fashion designer Aheda Zanetti—are available for sale in a number of Muslim countries and online. But they tend to be designed more for wading than for swimming, with folds of fabric that cling, drag, and get waterlogged, weighing the swimmer down. This week, Nike is unveiling its own line of modest swimwear. (No one at the company uses the word “burkini.”) The top-of-the-line, six-hundred-dollar Victory suit consists of a loose, two-layer tunic-cum-hoodie, paired with pants of a water-shedding combination of seventy per cent nylon and thirty per cent spandex. A less expensive option is a pool-ready shalwar kameez: a loose tunic (eighty dollars) and long pants in a slim or straight cut (sixty-eight dollars), with a hijab designed for swimming (forty dollars).
Nike made its first foray into modest athletic gear two years ago, when it introduced its thirty-five-dollar Pro Hijab, a stretchy, breathable head covering with a firm seal around the face. The idea for a modest swimwear line started to germinate in 2018, when a group of Nike designers went on a research trip through several countries. At swimming pools in Southeast Asia, the designers noticed that children were frolicking in the water while their heavily garbed mothers hovered at the pool’s edge; at the oceanside, adult women would only go up to their thighs. “I remember the team going, ‘Why aren’t the women in the water?’ ” Martha Moore, a Nike creative director in charge of swimwear, said. When the trip reached Australia, lifeguards at a beach in Victoria told the designers that they worried that Muslim women swimming in heavy garb posed a drowning risk.
Because of modesty concerns and a lack of obvious swimwear options, “a lot of Muslim girls never learn how to swim,” Ibtihaj Muhammad, an Olympic medalist in fencing and the model for Mattel’s “hijab Barbie” told me. Muhammad learned to swim as a girl in her family’s back-yard swimming pool, in New Jersey, where she could paddle privately in a T-shirt and shorts. “That’s the only reason I know how to swim.”
The Nike designers later paid a visit to the Muslim Educational Trust, a pre-kindergarten-to-twelfth-grade school and community center situated about seven miles from Nike’s corporate campus, in Beaverton, Oregon. Mona Almadhoun, the school’s swimming instructor, volunteered to guide the designers. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Almadhoun learned to swim wearing knee-length shorts and a tank top in women-only pools. In Beaverton, as in Saudi Arabia, girls were rigging their own suits, Almadhoun said: “There are some solutions, but not good ones.” Her students have their lessons during female-only hours in the community center’s indoor pool, when modesty standards are looser and they can swim with their arms and lower legs uncovered. But, without a full-body solution, the girls were unable to field a swim team that could compete, for instance, in a civic league, as the girls’ basketball team does.
To tackle the Victory suit, Moore’s sports-engineering-minded design team looked to a catsuit that they had created for Serena Williams, for the 2018 French Open. The tennis superstar had suffered a pulmonary embolism after giving birth to her daughter the previous year; the long legs of the catsuit acted as a compression garment, to lower her risk of blood clots. Williams’s suit struck the Nike designers as a starting point for full-body-coverage swimwear, and they took early designs to the Muslim Educational Trust. “We thought it was going to be a one-piece, Serena-esque,” Moore said. “They were, like, ‘No, no, we can’t wear tight tights!’ I was super naïve about the expectations.” (Ironically, Williams’s catsuit, like the burkini, became a locus of French body-policing when Bernard Giudicelli, the president of the French Tennis Federation, banned it from future tournaments.)
The Nike team added a tunic to cover the derrière and loose pants to disguise musculature. In their early tests at a pool on Nike’s corporate campus, they struggled with the sheer volume of material: folds of fabric—even water-repellent nylon—can swell up alarmingly in water, which is what happened with their first attempt at a hijab-like head covering. To prevent ballooning, the designers studied how sharks open their mouths while swimming, allowing water to flow through gills, and added gill-like mesh behind the neck, under the bodice, behind the knees, and at the ankles and wrists of the Victory suit. Realizing that the motions of swimming are similar to those of pitching a baseball, the team consulted Nike’s baseball-apparel designers on how to create a long sleeve that wouldn’t restrict a swimmer’s movement. They landed on a raglan sleeve, the diagonal seams of which avoid constricting movement at the shoulder.
Moore’s team drove back and forth to the Muslim center, where Almadhoun ran their solutions through her own set of trials: diving, practicing strokes, and making note of how the suit performed when she exited the pool, when many burkinis are waterlogged and clingy. Almadhoun was impressed that the Nike suit’s nylon fabric shed water immediately upon emerging from the pool, without any need to wring it out or pull fabric away from her body. “You can confidently get out of the pool and walk,” she said. She also liked the headpiece, which, unlike other burkinis, allowed full movement of her neck when rising for a breath after a dive. “You can turn your face to the left and right when you breathe,” she said.
Could a woman swim competitively in the Victory suit? Although it’s easy to picture an adolescent swimmer emerging from a club-team relay in the suit, it’s difficult to imagine that its loose layers wouldn’t put a swimmer at a pivotal disadvantage at more élite levels, especially given the rise of ever more hydrodynamic “tech suits.” But the point of Nike’s new line, said John Hoke, Nike’s chief design officer, isn’t to win the two-hundred-metre butterfly at regionals. It’s to swim—that’s all. “We hope this will be a moment where the world changes and more people are invited to sport,” Hoke said.
I took a swim in the Victory suit, slicing through the pool alongside Abdul-Qaadir. I swam without a sense of drag, which I found surprising given the sheer volume of fabric I was wearing. In the locker room, it took several minutes to puzzle through how to pull on the two-layer upper portion of the suit, with its attached hoodie. I was zipped up at the neck. Loops around my thumbs held my sleeves in place, and the legs were held by a strip of fabric beneath my heel. Yet, in the water, my strokes felt almost as fluid as they would were I in a one-piece Speedo. I even dived down and swam underwater. The thing I found bothersome was the hijab head covering, which dampened sound when wet and gripped my face, reminding me of the claustrophobic feel of wearing a scuba hood. I couldn’t wait to rip it off.
Poolside, Abdul-Quaadir laughed kindly when I complained about the Victory head covering. “It’s what’s your freedom,” she said. “I get to step on the court or the playing field or in the water and wear what I feel free in. That’s the beauty of this suit—I can dive in the water and not worry about anything showing and still have fun.”
Almadhoun told me that one of her high-school students has been speaking with classmates about raising funds for a girls’ swim team to compete in a citywide league. I asked if the new suits would make that more likely. “Definitely,” she said.
