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On a recent summer afternoon, Elizabeth Petersen, the 52-year-old founder of the swimwear line Margaux Sur Mer, pulled up at one of her favorite spots for lunch: Chez Jo, in the Cavalière district of the South of France, near St. Tropez. “We’ll be the only Americans there,” she told a group of friends prior to departing from her villa, a modernist perch above the Mediterranean. “The best way to go is by boat.” Petersen had enlisted her fiancé, Grégoire Buais—20 years her junior, she calls him her French MacGyver—to captain a speedboat that now bobbed in the azure sea.
The problem: the restaurant was more than 100 yards away, and owing to buoys and bathers, the speedboat couldn’t get any closer. A rowboat (with its own shirtless, MacGyver-y captain) could be commandeered to get the party from the sea to the shore, but who was going to do that? This was no job for Uber. The rowboat didn’t even have a phone.
Petersen stood on the bow of the ship and assessed the situation. Should they wave, holler, or turn the boat around and go somewhere else? To her, the choice was obvious.
“I’ll swim over and tell him we’re here,” she says, nonchalantly. With a swift tug on the zippers of her one-piece, she jumped in headfirst; a short time later, the group of 12 was tearing into lobster and raising glasses of rosé in celebration. “This is the point of my suits, after all,” Petersen notes. “If you can’t dive in and be fearless, what’s the point?”
Petersen’s brand, which officially launched this summer, is all about, in her words, “living life full throttle.” A mother of two and a former commercial real estate developer, she came up with Margaux Sur Mer because she couldn’t find bathing suits that matched her level of taste and season of life.
“They were either too small, not well-made, or cut in a way that doesn’t suit my seasoned body,” she says. “When I’d go to the beach, I would put on a persona that didn’t express my taste in the way that I could through my day-to-day dressing. I hated the idea of putting on the same triangle bikini that everyone else was putting on, like we’re all in a swimsuit competition and getting rated.”
Many brands cater to women beyond their teens and twenties; labels like Skims and TA3 promise to hold in areas of the body that are bound to change shape as we age. But Petersen took a different approach with Margaux Sur Mer, which is named after her 14-year-old daughter. Made in Milan with premium fabrics, her suits are designed to go from the beach to the club—Petersen loves to dance—and flatter the form without constricting the function of vital organs. “It’s nice to be able to sit at lunch and not be thinking in the back of your mind, ‘Oh, I’m uncomfortable,’” she says. “‘I’m in a corset. I can’t wait to get out of this.’”
Fully lined and silky to the touch, her styles dry quickly after a swim and resist the bunching that plagues many bathing suits.
“You work your ass off…and when you finally get your two hours on the beach, you don’t want to be uncomfortable,” Petersen says. “You don’t want a wedgie, hardware cutting into you, [or] a double-boob situation.”
If Petersen tells it like it is, it’s because she came up in the cutthroat world of commercial real estate in the 1990s, working with the homebuilding firm Kaufman and Broad in Las Vegas, New York, and her home state of Texas. She was often the only woman in the room. “I learned how not to give up,” she says, “how to stop hesitating, ask for what I wanted, and take risks.”
Those qualities helped her land a storefront along the cobblestone streets of St. Tropez, though she admits that her “French MacGyver,” a St. Tropez local who is also trained as a chef, had a hand in her coup. “The real estate market here couldn’t be different from the one in the U.S.,” said Petersen. “It’s all about who you know, and luckily, I know Grégoire.”
After lunch at Chez Jo, and after the speedboat back into town, Petersen popped into her shop to see how business was going. “The St. Tropez and Sardinia” textured one-pieces with come-hither zippers up the front “have been really popular,” a sales associate tells me.
“Zippers are sexy,” Petersen adds, adjusting a row of cerulean blue suits. “They’re also versatile—it helps the segue into a bodysuit—and you can decide how flirty you want to be.”
“They have an American sensibility,” says the sales associate. “There’s a touch of French too, but—”
“I am what I am,” Petersen says with a smile. “I can’t change that.” To that end, her vision of the brand continues to expand: she’s planning trunks for men, suits for kids, and more cuts to unlock the fearless leader in every woman.
“I think about the women that ventured into what they became known for later in life: Julia Child, Ina Garten,” she says. “With women, so much emphasis is put on youth, but we can be formidable whenever we want to be.” Even—perhaps especially—in a bathing suit.