“All my students are getting naked in the water!” said Andrea “Mona” Picasso one day in 2016,on a beach in Costa Rica. An instructor with Pura Vida ԹϺs, the lifelong surfer was teaching women’s-only camps in the beach hamlet of Santa Teresaand had noticed that most big-brand swimsuits weren’t going the distance. Bottoms slid off; tops exposed breasts. “I need to do something about it,” she concluded.
Picasso’s fellow coaches and students supplied her with the encouragement and empowerment she needed to round up some fabric and a few Costa Rican home sewersto start making better bathing suits. She wanted one, too. “In Costa Rica, you pretty much wear a bathing suit all day,” the 32-year-old explains. On her wish list: a suit with a pocket that wouldhold the keys to the motorcycleshe rode between home and the beach, and one that would keep her private parts covered while she surfed.
Her first design, the ($84), is simple but smashing. The wide shoulder straps stay in place comfortably, the open back feels cool in hot weather, a hidden zippered pocket in the rearwaist can holdkeys and a few bills, and the midcheek cut doesn’t ride up.
The suit’s initial success got Picasso wondering:What if I can do this in a waythat could reach a lot more women in the world?So with the help of her American neighbors in Costa Rica,in 2018, she relocated the business to Santa Cruz,California. NowMona products are made in Los Angeles, where skilled seamstressesand better production facilities have helped herrefine her cottage-industry swimwear into something that can compete on the global market. She named the company Monaafter her own nickname. (Mona means “monkey” in Spanish, but it’salso a slang term for a sassy, elegant girl).
She sourced a sustainable fabric made from 100 percent recycled materialand has expanded her line to include several additional one-piece suits (such as the zip-front, long-sleeved , $149) as well as various bikinis and the ($48).
“A rash guard seems simple,” Picasso says. “But it’s important that it doesn’t ride up when you’re surfingand that it doesn’t pull on your neck.”
I can attest that Picasso’s Vitality shirt does neither. It felt like a second skin on my recent trip to Fiji, where I wore it surfing and stand-up paddleboarding. I stick to really mellow waves, so to learn how Mona suits fare in bigger swells, I handed off the Drifter to a surfing instructor who works out of PlayitasBeach in Costa Rica.
“It is the most comfortable surf outfit I have ever worn,” she says. “Normally, when we have swells, paddling out past the breakers can be really rough, and Iam always rearranging my suit and getting distracted from paddling.With Mona, I feel protected from the elements and can completely focus on surfing and paddling and having fun without worrying about the suit getting ripped off or having to readjust anything. I absolutely love it!”
Picasso also recently debuted a line of Mona yoga tops and bottoms. Meanwhile, future iterations of her swim and surf line will include more cuts that flatter a variety of body shapes. Says Picasso, “I’d like to accommodate bigger boobs, and the American audience has been asking for more conservative styles. We’d like to offer suits for the widest possible audience.”