If you're lucky enough to have escaped to sunny shores of late, chances are your colleagues will have complimented you upon your return on your summer glow. Yet tanning as a fashionable practice is both a relatively recent historical phenomenon and one that varies according to place. In fact, sunbathing first became chic by accident, after Coco Chanel inadvertently caught too much sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise in 1923. The photos of her disembarking from a yacht in Cannes set new beauty standards, which until then had associated darker skin tones with the lower classes' outdoor toil.
