The Bikini

In the summer of 1946 a two piece bathing suit called the “Atome” was hitting the beach in France, advertised as the world’s smallest bathing suit. Automobile designer Louis Réard, who had inherited his wife’s lingerie business, seeing the potential of this smallest of bathing suits, quickly designed his own even smaller bathing suit (in a risqué fashion arms-race)—this one just string and four triangles and that now, shockingly, revealed the navel. Knowing that it would cause a scandal—for he could find no models to model it and had to hire a nude dancer (see image below)—he sought a name that would evoke the explosive effect it would have on society; the smallest of apparel able to destroy the giant of puritanical modesty. On July 1st the week before the release, the United States military, basking in the triumph of war and their new global super-power status, had dropped a nuclear bomb on the Bikini Atoll in the south pacific and the billowing clouds of inferno were all over the newspapers. So Réard, thinking of palm trees, the great atomic future and U.S. Military killing power, named his smallest of bathing suits the bikini. Immediately popular upon its release on July 5th (now international bikini day), the newspapers were in ecstasy, the Vatican decreed it a sin, beaches all over the world banned its use and it soon became a best seller, liberating bodies even while constricting standards of beauty. The bikini, symbol of the new era: sex, glamour, commodity, and death on the scale of the planet.