Jamaican Tessa Prendergast, designer of the taboo-breaking bikini
Published:Wednesday | November 11, 2020 | 12:14 AM
The description on the Christie’s auction house website states that the iconic bikini worn by Ursula Andress in Dr No was designed by Andress in conjunction with the film’s director, Terence Young and made in Jamaica by a West Indian dressmaker known to the two. However, the reality is that the West Indian dressmaker, Tessa Prendergast, was also one of the designers of the iconic garment, which is being auctioned this week for between US$300,000 and US$500,000.
Online records show that Tessa Prendergast, later known by her married name Tessa Welbourne, was a Jamaican actress, fashion designer, businesswoman and socialite. “A renowned beauty and movie starlet in the 1950s, she is best remembered today as the designer of the taboo-breaking white bikini worn by Ursula Andress in the 1962 film Dr No.”
A Jamaica College old boy, Ward Mills, told The Gleaner that he knows cousins of Prendergast, who confirmed that “Tessa is the one who put Ursula in that bikini”.
Born in Kingston on October 17, 1928, Prendergast’s bio states that her father, Louis, was a wealthy plantation owner who died while she was a baby. Her mother later married Noel Nethersole, an Oxford-educated economist who, along with future Prime Minister Norman Manley, established the People’s National Party and served as Jamaica’s minister of finance from 1955 to 1959.
BACKGROUND
Prendergast was raised in London, England. Although she would spend most of her life in Britain, she regularly visited Jamaica, and at times lived and worked here.
It is said that “with her stunning looks and figure, Prendergast gained notice while singing and dancing at London’s Pigalle nightclub. She began doing bit parts in British films, mostly in “exotic” roles, such as performing the Dance of the Seven Veils in the film Song of Paris. She caught the attention of Warner Brothers, with whom she signed in the early 1950s.
Reports are that Prendergast became best known, however, for her glamour photos in magazines and “a widely publicised 1955 incident in Rome, in which King Farouk of Egypt and an unnamed Italian prince allegedly came nearly to blows in vying for her affection”. It is also said that these stories were almost certainly exaggerated.
In 1953 she married American cinematographer Scotty Welbourne, with whom she had a child. In the late 1950s, she left acting to start a clothing design business with Liz de Lisser in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
In 1962, the producers of the James Bond film Dr No (filmed in Jamaica) asked Prendergast, who was by then using her married name, Welbourne, to provide wardrobe for actress Ursula Andress. It is said that working with Andress, Welbourne created the ivory hipster bikini which started a new trend in women’s swimwear and made Andress a major star. She passed away in June 2001.