A black-and-white photo depicting a man in white writing on a pad of paper while standing next to a blond woman in a ruffled bikini has circulated online for years, with many internet users claiming the photo dated to 1957 and showed an Italian police officer ticketing the woman for wearing a bikini in public.
For example, a June 2025 Reddit post (archived) featuring the image had a caption reading, "A police officer ticketing a woman for wearing a bikini on an Italian beach, 1957."
A police officer ticketing a woman for wearing a bikini on an Italian beach, 1957
byu/----OZYMANDIAS inpics
Other examples of posts sharing the image with similar captions appeared on platforms including X (archived), Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived).
Ultimately, while the image was an authentic photo — meaning it showed no signs of digital manipulation — there was not enough secure information about it to verify that it genuinely depicted a police officer writing the woman a real ticket for wearing a bikini. In other words, it's possible that the image showed a staged scene featuring actors or models, or that the police officer was writing the woman a ticket for some other infraction.
The details that appeared in many of the social media captions came from Ullstein Bild, an image archive that holds the rights to the photo in Germany.
We reached out to both Ullstein Bild and its partner Picture Alliance, the agency that licenses the photo in Germany, to ask about the image's origins. Representatives for both companies said over email that the image originally came from the American newswire agency United Press International, and that they had no further information about the image's creation or photographer. The representatives also said that they did not know who, if anyone, held the rights to the image outside of Germany.
However, the image did not appear in UPI's online photo archive. A contact page on UPI's website noted that the organization no longer held the rights to — or had any information about — any photos not present in the archive.
UPI — which in 1957 was known as UP, short for "United Press" — licensed photos to newspapers around the world. However, searches for key words including "bikini," "ticket" and "Rimini" (the city in which the photo was taken, according to Ullstein Bild and Picture Alliance) on the newspaper archives Newspapers.com and ProQuest Historical Newspapers returned no examples of articles featuring the photo.
As a result, we were unable to confirm that Ullstein Bild's information about the photo came directly from UPI — or that the image originated as a UPI photo at all.
Public interest in the image
According to reverse-image searches on TinEye and Google, the photo began to circulate online in August 2016, when it appeared in a New York Times article titled, "From Bikinis to Burkinis, Regulating What Women Wear." (That article credited the photo to Ullstein Bild and another of their partners, Akg-Images; at the time of this writing, the Akg-Images page credited Picture Alliance.)
(New York Times)
The article's author, Alissa J. Rubin, said in an email that she first encountered the image earlier that summer when it appeared in a Paris gallery exhibition celebrating the 70th anniversary of the bikini's invention. We've reached out to that exhibition's curator to ask for any further information about the photo's origin, and will update this story if we hear back.
Within a month of the New York Times article's publication, the image was the subject of popular posts on social media platforms including Reddit and X.
Also in August 2016, Il Resto del Carlino — an Italian newspaper based in Bologna, around an hour's drive from Rimini — ran an article about the eruption of interest in the photo (a transcript of the article was available through PoliziaMunicipale, a reference website for Italian municipal police). The article included a public appeal for any information about the people in the photo. We've reached out to the paper to ask if it learned anything further since 2016, and will update this story if and when we hear back.
In 2022, another Italian newspaper, NewsRimini, also published a short article detailing how interest in the photo had persisted since 2016. That article noted that the names of the woman and the police officer remained unknown despite the popularity of the photo online and in publications.
Were bikinis illegal in Italy in 1957?
Over email, Gianluca Braschi, the director of the State Archives of Rimini, said that while he could not vouch for the accuracy of the photo's caption, two different laws on the books at the time did attempt to regulate swimwear on Italian beaches.
One such law, from 1932, forbade "bathing in public view in a state of complete nudity and with indecent swimwear," according to Braschi. Braschi said that law was technically in place until 2000 — though it was not consistently enforced.
In 1948, Italian Interior Minister Mario Scelba also issued a directive regulating bathing suits — and, in particular, how much skin could be left uncovered. Braschi said that following this directive, various Italian police forces did issue "checks" that could "involve the actual measurement" of bikini bottoms.
Some American newspaper articles from the 1950s mentioned the ban. For example, one that appeared in the Buffalo Courier Express in 1950 said police in Genoa had warned "25 girl bathers in the last two days for wearing too scanty costumes."
Immodest Bathers Receive Warning
Article from Jul 19, 1950 Buffalo Courier Express (Buffalo, New York)
However, some social media users have expressed doubts that the scene in the photo would realistically have occurred in Rimini — or anywhere in Italy — in 1957, despite the laws on the books. For example, some Reddit users commented in threads about the photo to point out the existence of late-1950s Italian movies like "Poveri ma Belli" that showed women openly wearing bikinis (see the 1:26:00 time stamp here, for example), as well as Rimini-specific postcards from the same time that depicted bikini-wearing women.
Similarly, the aforementioned 2016 Il Resto del Carlino article included several quotes from Rimini residents skeptical that the photo authentically documented a police officer ticketing a woman for simply wearing a bikini on a Rimini beach.
One individual quoted in the article, Giorgio Mussoni, told Il Resto del Carlino that he worked as a lifeguard on a popular Rimini beach throughout the 1950s, and that he never witnessed any officers issuing tickets to any of the "plenty" of women he saw wearing bikinis there.
According to the article, Mussoni said, "I think that photo could have been staged."
In summary, it was possible that the photo authentically showed a real police officer issuing a real ticket to a woman wearing a bikini. However, there was some evidence that women regularly wore bikinis on Rimini beaches in the 1950s despite the laws. Ultimately, because we found no secure documentation about the photo's origin, it was not possible to determine whether the caption that has circulated with it was accurate.
We originally looked into the history of this photograph in 2021.
Snopes' archives contributed to this report.