“Oh my god, there must be something better than this,” the designer cried: Australia’s burkini set to put Muslim women in the swim.

SYDNEY (AFP) - What do you get when you cross Australian beach culture with a desire to remain clothed in a way acceptable to Muslim women? If you’re designer Aheda Zanetti, you get what she says is the world’s first two-piece Islamic swimsuit, the burkini.

While other Islamic swimsuits exist, Zanetti says her light-weight, head-to-ankle costumes are the first to be streamlined down to a two-piece suit incorporating a head covering. With Australian beaches full of girls in skimpy bikinis and revealing one-pieces, there was a “hole in the market that needed to be filled” for more modest beachwear, she said.

“A lot of girls were missing out, a lot of women were missing out, on a lot of sporting activities, including swimming,” Zanetti told AFP from the clutter of her southwestern Sydney shopfront. “There was nothing really suitable for them to wear if they wanted to participate in sport. And if they did participate in sports with a veil, or whatever they wanted to wear, there really wasn’t something suitable. The fabric was not right, the construction wasn’t right.”

Zanetti is something of an accidental designer. Trained as a hairdresser, she has never worn a burqa, the restrictive all-encompassing gown worn by women in more conservative Muslim cultures from which her full-body swimsuits take their name. And she never wore a veil until she began designing sportswear.

But the 39-year-old mother-of-four realised that there would be a market for Islamic sportswear when she saw her hijab-wearing niece play netball.

“And when I was looking at her playing sport with a two-piece veil and a skivvy (long-sleeved, high-necked shirt) and the pants and then her netball jersey on top and then her skirt, I thought, ‘Oh my god, there must be something better than this’,” she said.