Interesting Historical Facts about Bikini

Louis Reard’s original bikini consisted of only 30 square inches of fabric. When Reard planned to showcase his swimsuit creation at a Paris fashion show, he was unable to find any Parisian models who would be seen in the skimpy garment. Finally, he hired Micheline Bernardini, a model who also worked as a nude dancer in a Paris nightclub to debut the bikini to the fashion world. Only a few years after the introduction of the bikini in 1946, fashion designers began to create new innovations to keep their swimsuit a step above other swimsuits. Such innovations included a bikini constructed entirely of red hair, a bikini with propellers attached to the bra cups, and a bikini constructed solely of porcupine quills. Interestingly, these bikinis did not retain widespread popularity. The bikini was originally shunned in many countries throughout the world and took quite some time to gain in popularity. In fact, the wearing of bikinis was actually banned at the 1951 Miss World pageant. It was believed that contestants wearing bikinis in the swimsuit competition would have an unfair advantage over their more modest competitors. The release of the popular song, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” in 1960 rocketed the bikini swimsuit into a position of popular culture icon. As society began to soften somewhat on the bikini in the 1960s, a number of beach-themed movies served to popularize the bikini among teenage girls. One such film employed the interesting, if somewhat odd, title “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.” In 1964, the bikini made it to the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time. The bikini pictured was a relatively modest, white swimsuit with brief-style bottoms and a bra-like top. Inspired by the unique underwear fashion innovations of pop singers Madonna and Cyndi Lauper in the 1980s, bikini designers briefly experimented with boned and wired bustier tops and girdle-like sarong bottoms. The constricting nature of these bikinis, however, did not attain them widespread popularity. In 1983, Carrie Fisher donned the now famous gold bikini in the third installment of the Star Wars saga “Return of the Jedi.” Interestingly, this film received the highest box office returns of any of the other members of George Lucas’ original trilogy. Bikini sales dropped tremendously during the 1980s and early 1990s as the one-piece swimsuit experience a resurgence of popularity. In 1988, Louis Reard’s original bikini company was forced to close, as bikini sales plummeted to just 30% of the swimsuit market. The sexy belted bikini that rocketed Ursula Andress to fame in the 1962 James Bond classic Dr. No was replicated with almost equal acclaim by Halle Berry in the 2002 James Bond feature Die Another Day. The bikini became the official beach volleyball uniform for women when the Olympic Committee officially recognized the sport in 1993. American athletes Misty May and Kerri Walsh served to greatly widen the popularity of the sport, and its bikini uniform, with their stunning gold medal victory in the 2004 Olympic games.

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Bikini word origin

The word bikini has rather an interesting etymology. Unlike the word swimsuit, which is entirely functional and descriptive in its purpose, the word bikini implies much more about the bikini’s history than it does the bikini’s purpose.

Most scholars assume that the bikini swimsuit was named after the famous Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. While it may seem strange for the birthplace of the actual bikini swimsuit to be in France and the birthplace of the name bikini to be in the South Pacific, these two areas of the world actually had quite a bit in common during the historical time period of the introduction of the bikini.

When the bikini was introduced to the world in 1946, World War II had just ended the spring before, and the world was still rollicking from the horrendous nature of that war. After detonating the controversial atomic bomb on two Japanese cities to end the Pacific war, the United States was setting off further test bombs on the Marshall Islands during that same summer. Needless to say, the destructive power of the atomic bomb was still quite a shock to people around the world. While Jacques Heim and Louis Reard were simultaneously inventing and marketing their own versions of the bikini swimsuit, people all over the world were marveling at the awesome power of the atomic bomb.

No one knows for sure whether Louis Reard was inspired enough by the atomic bomb detonations in the Bikini Atoll to christen his swimsuit the bikini or if he chose the name at random. Whatever the reason, the name bikini stuck as the official title of the midriff-baring, two-piece swimsuit. Many etymologists have assumed that Reard believed his swimsuit creation would create a shock equal in its reverberation to that of the atomic bomb (as it proved to do in the following years). The term bikini has now become so lodged in the vocabulary of swimsuits that several new types of swimsuits have spawned from it, including the bandini, tankini, camikini, and monokini. 

History of the Bikini

The history of the bikini begins far before the official introduction of the bikini swimsuit in the summer of 1946. Some historians believe that the bikini may have been one of the first public swimming costumes in existence. Drawing evidence from 300 A.D. Roman mosaics, historians point to the bikini as the swimsuit of choice for ancient Roman women. The history of the bikini, however, may begin nearly 2000 years sooner than even ancient Rome! Minoan wall paintings from approximately 1600 B.C. also depict women wearing the seemingly quite popular two-piece bathing costume. The official history of the bikini, under that name, begins in the summer of 1946, just one year after the tumultuous end of World War II. During that summer, as France was seeking to recover from the dreadful effects of the war, two French designers almost simultaneously created and marketed the bikini swimsuit. Barely leading the charge, Jacques Heim, a fashion designer and beach shop owner in the French resort town of Cannes, introduced his swimsuit creation, the “Atome,” early in the summer of 1946. The swimsuit was named the Atome because of its miniscule size (as compared to the then smallest known particle of matter, the atom). Heim intended to sell his swimsuit in his beach shop. To drum up business and increase awareness of the new swimsuit, Heim sent skywriters high above the Cannes sky, proclaiming the new Atome to be “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Sadly for Jacques Heim, another French fashion designer was also hard at work creating a remarkably similar swimsuit in the summer of 1946. Just three weeks after Heim began marketing his swimsuit, Louis Reard, a mechanical engineer who had decided to dabble in swimsuit design, sent out skywriters over the French Riviera. The message these skywriters carried was simple but powerful marketing: “Bikini—smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world.” Perhaps due to Reard’s obvious marketing skills or a simple turn of fate, the name bikini became the official tag for the two-piece swimsuit. The bikini made its first proper introduction to the world of fashion design on July 5, 1946, as it is was worn and displayed at a Paris fashion show by French model Micheline Bernardini. Reaction to the bikini was immediate and explosive. As one American correspondent put it (in typical Texan style), “All of a sudden, a blond named Micheline Bernardini ambles out in what any dern (sic) fool could see was the smallest bathing in the world, including West Texas. Why folks, that suit was so small that…” Any number of phrases could complete this statement and would adequately describe the male reaction to the bikini. Needless to say, most of those who viewed the new swimsuit were equally shocked and titillated by its minimalist style. The bikini began to be marketed and sold in the United States just one year after its introduction in France. Reaction to the swimsuit was great, but sales were initially quite slow. Men and women alike assumed that the suit was simply too bare and scandalous for conservative American women to don in public. American women did indeed approach the swimsuit quite cautiously until the revolutionary decade of the 1960s, in which bikini sales soared tremendously. The bikini has now become such an entrenched part of swimsuit design that it is a wonder the modern swimsuit is only 60 years old. True to its explosive nature, the bikini has inspired even more shocking innovations in swimsuit design, including the short-lived monokini and the immensely popular thong bikini. It would be interesting to learn if Louis Reard has the foresight to know of the far-reaching implications of the scanty two pieces of cloth that comprised the original bikini:)

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