Rose Marie Reid was born on September 12, 1906 in Cardston, Alberta, Canada, one of seven children of William Elvie Yancey, a storekeeper and farmer, and Marie Hyde, a seamstress. When Reid was young, the family moved to a Mormon community in Wieser, Idaho.
In Wieser, Idaho she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class at the age of sixteen. Her family was poor and she did not pursue further education.
As a child she worked on farms and in stores and learned to sew from her mother. A sixth-generation Mormon, she felt that women should remain at home with their children.
She did not begin designing swimwear until after the birth of the first of her three children. Until the 1930's, bathing suits were made of heavy wool, which made it difficult to swim. Reid designed a suit for her husband made of duck cloth, which he tried to market.
An avid swimmer herself, Reid in 1938 made a woman's bathing suit of heavy cotton with shoelaces going up the sides for comfortable swimming. She wore the suit to a swim meet and caught the eye of an executive from the Hudson's Bay Company, a Canadian department store, and he ordered a dozen of the suits. Reid did not want to go into business but her husband did, and the orders for bathing suits began coming in. Reid gathered together sixteen women with sewing machines to complete her first orders.
The first year of business brought a gross income of $10, 000, with which the Reids invested in sixteen sewing machines and established Reid's Holiday Togs, Ltd. The following year, her bathing suits were used by the participants in the 1937 British Empire games in Australia. Reid tried to balance raising children and running her nascent business. Despite her husband's criticism that she neglected the business for her children, Reid often took them on business trips to New York's fabric retailers. Her six-week-old daughter, Sharon, became the youngest baby to fly across the country before 1938.
She purchased her former husband's half of the company. By this time, she had captured 50 percent of the swimsuit market in Canada. Jack Kessler, an acquaintance and a clothing salesman in Seattle, convinced her to move to California. He became her partner and invested $50, 000 in her swimsuit business. They established a plant thirty miles from the Los Angeles airport. Reid began experimenting with weaving silver and gold metallic yarn into the fabric of bathing suits, and, on December 20, 1946, the company debuted a new line of swimwear, including a gold metallic bathing suit that sold for an unprecedented $90.
She was the first to transform the bathing suit from a dull uniform into a fashion item. She also quadrupled its price. Reid felt that women should "feel as dressed in a bathing suit as in an evening gown. "
She wanted to make bathing suits that would flatter all types of female figures and developed models to complement six body types: the heavy-busted, the large-hipped, the pudgy or mature, the petite, the tall, and the "perfect" body. She developed an innovative line of swimwear that included such features as inside brassieres, tummy-tuck panels, stay-down legs, spiral stays in strapless suits, and laces up the sides. She was the first to introduce dress sizes in swimwear and the first to use stretchable fabrics and colors in bathing suits. Beginning in 1946, Reid's sales increased by more than $1 million each year.
In 1960, the company's sales came to $18. 4 million, amounting to almost 10 percent of total sales of women's bathing suits in the nation. Between 1950 and 1956, Reid built a line of bathing suits around the idea of "imagineering, " the concept that a woman needed different bathing suits for different situations, such as sunning, swimming, and lounging. Another marketing technique involved breaking with the tradition of selling only one line of suits each year. Reid created a late-summer line and a winter line for cruises, Florida vacations, and Christmas presents. She created at least one hundred designs each season.
It soon became necessary to build another factory. Located in the San Fernando Valley, the factory cost $2 million and employed 1, 100 workers, bringing the total number employed in the two factories to 1, 900. The new factory, which began operations in October 1960, featured a fifty-foot swimming pool that was used as a test basin for fabrics as well as a recreation facility for employees on the weekends. Concerned about strengthening employer-employee relations in an increasingly high-skilled enterprise, the Reid Company staged two upscale fashion shows for its employees so that assembly line workers could have the satisfaction of seeing the finished products.
In the 1950's Reid was one of the Big Four bathing suit designers in California, the heart of the swimwear industry, even though she designed only for women. Her bathing suits were sold all over the country and to forty-six other nations. She was noted for elegant, understated swimsuits that preserved an element of modesty despite fashion trends toward increasingly more bare skin. She refused to design bikinis, calling them "hideous, vulgar, and immoral, " and broke with her company over the bikini issue. Reid's work was recognized by her winning the American Designer Sportswear Award and the Academy Award of Design, both in 1958.
Two years after she left the company in 1961, the factory folded. Reid sold the right to use her name in 1964 to the Jonathan Logan Company, which still puts out bathing suits under her name. After she left the company, Reid began designing a synthetic-fiber wig for women under the name Reid-Meredith. She also moved to Provo, Utah, to live near her grandchildren and continue her missionary work for the Mormon Church. She died in Provo. There was some confusion as to her age in obituaries, because throughout her career Reid preferred to say she was six years younger than she was really was. She felt that appearing younger was necessary to retain her credibility in a fashion industry that appealed to young people.
Reid believed that every woman should feel just as glamorous in a swimsuit as she did in an evening gown, and she designed her suits accordingly.
An early first marriage, which soon ended in divorce, took her out of Idaho in 1933 to Vancouver, British Columbia.
She married Jack C. Reid, a professional swimming instructor, on November 20, 1935.
Reid was divorced on April 10, 1946.
