I think it depends where you go.
We don't go much to the beach anymore, but when my wife and I were in Puerto Rico a few years back, the "style" of choice for many young women was the "string bikini." It can go as "far" as just the nipples and the vulva being covered.

My wife would consider being nude at the resort to be more "modest" than wearing a string-bikini on a regular beach. It might seem ironic.

Dino asked if it's really true that bikinis are still controversial for some.

My answer: ABSOLUTELY! 100 PERCENT!

I know women raised not only not to wear bikinis, but to wear T-shirts over their one-piece swimsuits. I know women who wear bikinis at home with families and close friends to suntan, but not to public beaches or pools. I know mothers who wore bikinis at home with their husbands and families until their older boys became teenagers and then switched to one-pieces, and told their daughters to switch to one-pieces when they started to develop. Is that good? Of course not. It teaches body shame, sending bad messages to boys and girls about their bodies.

Yes, at some beaches 90 percent of women wear bikinis. (I see a lot less than 90 percent when I visit textile beaches, but I mostly go to nude beaches so I have less experience with textile beaches.) What you're not seeing are the huge numbers of women who avoid public beaches, either because they don't think they look good enough to be seen in public on a beach, or because they've been socialized that swimming is okay with family and friends but not with "stranger guys," or because they look very good in a bikini and are afraid of cell phone cameras. Some women only go to public pools, not beaches, because unsupervised cameras are banned and badly behaved men get told to leave. Many people visiting public pools are young mothers with children, or teenagers in high school who are officially there to "babysit" their younger brothers and sisters, but actually are there to see and be seen by other high school students. It's easy to tell the teenagers flirting with each other at the public pool, and it's really fun to see young love blooming when teenagers are enjoying being attracted to each other wearing much less than in school or other places. The pool and the beach are some of the very few socially acceptable places where, as Ramblinman wrote:

Here's one example of what I mean. Back in college, one of my friends (I’ll call her Maria) was ethnically Cuban, from a quite conservative Catholic family, but had broken out of her shell when she came to college. Her parents let her go to the beach growing up but told her the bikinis had to stop once she entered high school. She didn't take much persuading because she put on a lot of weight once puberty hit and became very embarrassed about her looks.

Like many college students, she "broke out of her shell" as a freshman, and started dating another Hispanic guy who was a surfer and quite physically fit. He encouraged her to progress from paddling around in pools into serious open water swimming, which is fantastic aerobic exercise and a full-body workout, and as she saw pounds melting off, she got her body confidence back, started wearing bikinis again, and as she learned to enjoy and appreciate men complimenting her on her looks, her boyfriend suggested she might like to walk with him farther along the beach to the nude section.

Like most overly sheltered young women, she had a mix of emotions but agreed to go with him as long as they could keep their swimsuits on. Public nude beaches can't enforce nudity so they were far from the only couple walking along the beach who kept their swimsuits on. As some of the nudists on the beach greeted Maria's boyfriend, she realized it wasn't his first time on that section of the beach. As they began to walk back, she asked him directly, "You've been here before, right?" He admitted he'd been coming for years (he grew up in the area). His parents encouraged him to go to the nude section as well as the surfing section to get a realistic idea what men and women looked like. Both of his parents were occasional nudists and sometimes went to the nude part of the beach though his father was more interested in surfing and his mother mostly liked suntanning on the beach while her husband surfed.

You know how that story went. After a few more visits to the nude beach, and Maria meeting some female students on the beach who she knew, the day came when she whispered to her boyfriend, "Let's go over there behind those rocks and get naked."

Of course her boyfriend loved it, and of course Maria was terrified. I’ll write more later on that but need to check on some details with Maria before posting what I've written from what she's told me.