History Of The Bikini
The history of one of the most beautiful things in the world – the Bikini!A bikini or two-piece is a type of women’s swimsuit with two separate parts, one covering the breasts (optionally in the case of the Monokini), the other the groin (and optionally the buttocks), leaving an uncovered area between the two garments. It is often worn in hot weather or while swimming. The shapes of both parts of a bikini closely resemble women’s underwear, and the lower part of a bikini can range from the more revealing thong or g-string to briefs and modest square-cut shorts.
The bikini was invented by French engineer Louis Réard in 1946 and he named it after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the site of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon test on July 1, 1946. The reasoning for the name was that the burst of excitement created by it would be like a nuclear device. The Monokini, a bikini variant, derives its name as a back formation from bikini, interpreting the first syllable as the Latin prefix bi- meaning “two” or “doubled”, and substituting for it mono- meaning “one”. Jacques Heim called his bikini precursor the Atome, named for its size, and Louis Réard claimed to have “split the Atome” to make it smaller.The bikini is the most popular beachwear around the globe, which is, according to French fashion historian Olivier Saillard, due to “the power of women, and not the power of fashion”. As he explains, “The emancipation of swimwear has always been linked to the emancipation of women.” By the mid 2000s bikinis had become a US$811 million business annually, according to the NPD Group, a consumer and retail information company. The bikini has boosted spin-off services like bikini waxing and the sun tanning industries.
Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes are on Greek urns and paintings from 1400 BC.
Ancient artwork dating back to the Diocletian period (286-305 AD) in Villa Romana del Casale outside the town of Piazza Armerina, Sicily depicts women in garments resembling bikinis. The Roman villa, with its large and complex collection of Roman mosaics, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Images of ten women, dubbed the “Bikini Girls”, playing in clothing that would pass as bikinis today are the most replicated mosaic among the 37 million colored tiles at the site. On the floor of the room dubbed the “Chamber of the Ten Maiden” (Sala delle Dieci Ragazze in Italian), the mosaic was excavated by Gino Vinicio Gentile in 1950-60. The bikini girls are in the artwork dubbed “Coronation of the Winner”, performing exercises including weight-lifting, discus throwing, running and ball-games, while one woman in a toga is depicted with a crown in her hand and one of the Maidens is holding a palm frond in her hand.
In ancient Rome, the bikini-style bottom, a wrapped loincloth made of cloth or leather, was called subligar or subligaculum
(meaning “little binding underneath”), while a band of cloth or leather to support the breasts was called strophium or mamillare. One such bottom, made of leather, from the time of Roman Britain was displayed Museum of London in 1998. Martial, a Latin poet from Hispania who published between AD 86 and 103, satirized a female athlete who played ball in a bikini-like garb.In 1907, Australian swimmer and performer Annette Kellerman was arrested on a Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting one-piece suit that became the generally accepted swimsuit for women by 1910. Pictures of her wearing that garb was produced as evidence in the Esquire magazine versus United States Postmaster General legal battle over indecency as late as in 1943.
In 1913, inspired by the introduction of female athletes into Olympic swimming events, the designer Carl Jantzen made the first functional two-piece swimwear, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves on top. The swimsuit apron, a popular design for early swimwear, disappeared by 1918, leaving a tunic covering the shorts.
Though matching stockings were still worn, bare legs were exposed from the bottom of the trunks to the top of the shorts. With the advent of new materials like lastex and nylon, by 1934 the swimsuit started hugging the body and was constructed to allow shoulder straps to be lowered for tanning. Burlesque and vaudeville performers wore two-piece outfits in the 1920s, and in 1932 French designer Madeleine Vionnet offered an exposed midriff in an evening gown. In 1935 American designer Claire McCardell cut out the side panels of a maillot-style bathing suit, which is seen as the bikini’s forerunner.Two-piece swimsuits without the usual skirt panel and other superfluous material started appearing in the US when the government ordered a 10% reduction in the fabric used in woman’s swimwear in 1943 as part of wartime rationing. Films of holidaymakers in Germany in the 1930s show women wearing two-piece bathing suits. They were seen a year later in Gold Diggers of 1933. The elaborately and lavishly assembled Busby Berkeley film Footlight Parade of 1932 showcases stunning aquachoreography that profusely featured what could only be regarded as bikini swimwear. Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties series (1914-1919) and Dorothy Lamour’s The Hurricane (1937) also showed two-piece bathing suits.
By the early 1940s two-piece swimsuits were seen frequently on American beaches. The July 9, 1945 issue of Life shows women in Paris wearing similar items. Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner all tried out similar swimwear or beachwear by then. Pin ups of Hayworth and Esther Williams in the garb were widely distributed.
The modern bikini was introduced by French engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946.
Réard was a car engineer by training, but by 1946 he was running his mother’s lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergères in Paris. Heim was working on a prototype for a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer’s navel. In May 1946, he unveiled his invention and advertised it as the world’s “smallest bathing suit”. He sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as “smaller than the smallest swimsuit”. The idea struck him when he saw women rolling up their beachwear to get a better tan.Réard could not find a model who would dare to wear his design. He ended up hiring as his model Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris. That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back made out of 30 square inches (194 cm²) of clothes with newspaper type printed across, was “officially” introduced on July 5 at a fashion event at Piscine Molitor, a popular public pool in Paris. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters. Heim’s design was the first to be worn on the beach, but the genre of clothing was given its name by Réard. Reard’s business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn’t a genuine bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.” French newspaper Le Figaro wrote, “People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life.”
But bikini sales did not pick up around the world, and women stuck with more traditional two-piece swimsuits. Réard went back to designing orthodox knickers to sell in his mother’s shop. Actresses in movies like My Favorite Brunette (1947) and the model on a 1948 cover of Life magazine were shown in traditional two-piece swimwear, not the bikini.
In 1950, Time interviewed American swimsuit mogul Fred Cole and reported that he had “little but scorn for France’s famed Bikinis,” because, according to him they were designed for “diminutive Gallic women”. “French girls have short legs,” he explained to Time, “Swimsuits have to be hiked up at the sides to make their legs look longer.” Modern Girl magazine wrote in 1957, “It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.” Movie star Esther Williams commented, “A bikini is a thoughtless act.” One writer described it as a “two piece bathing suit which reveals everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name.”According to Kevin Jones, a curator and fashion historian at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, “Réard was ahead of his time by about 15 to 20 years. Only women in the vanguard, mostly upper-class European women embraced it, just like the upper-class European women who first cast off their corsets after World War I.”
Brigitte Bardot, photographed wearing similar garments on the beaches of Cannes during the Film Festival (1953) and who
wore a bikini in And God Created Woman (1956), helped popularize the bikini in Europe in the 1950s and created a market for the swimwear in the US. Photographs of Bardot in bikini on the beaches of Saint-Tropez in French Riviera, according to the The Guardian UK, turned Saint-Tropez into the bikini capital of the world. But, Catholic countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy banned the bikini, and it remained prohibited in many US states. Hays production code for US movies allowed two-piece gowns but prohibited navels on-screen. In 1951 bikinis were banned from the Miss World Contest following the crowning of Miss Sweden in a bikini and subsequent protests with a number of countries threatening to withdraw. The National Legion of Decency pressured Hollywood to keep bikinis from being featured in Hollywood movies.In 1962, an icon was born as Bond Girl Ursula Andress emerged from the sea wearing a white bikini in Dr. No. The Dr. No bikini scene has been named as one of the most memorable scenes from the British spy film series. Channel 4 of UK declared it as the top bikini moment in film history, Virgin Media puts it in ninth position in its list of top ten movie bikini, and the top position in the top ten Bond girls. The Herald (Glasgow) put the scene as best ever bikini scene on the basis of a poll. It also helped shape the career of Ursula Andress, the look of the quintessential Bond movie.
According to Andress, “This bikini made me into a success.” That white bikini has been described as a “defining moment in the sixties liberalization of screen eroticism”. According to British Broadcasting Corporation, “So iconic was the look that it was repeated 40 years later by Halle Berry in the Bond movie Die Another Day.” In 2001, the Dr. No bikini sold at an auction for US$61,500.The appearance of bikinis kept increasing both on screen and off. The sex appeal of bikini prompted numerous film and television productions, including Dr. Strangelove. They include the numerous surf movies of the early 1960s. In 1960, Brian Hyland’s pop song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” inspired a bikini-buying spree. By 1963, the movie Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, led a wave of films that made the bikini a pop-culture symbol.
In the time of the sexual revolution in 1960s America, bikinis started getting popular fast. In 1965, a woman told Time it was “almost square” not to wear bikinis, which, given the outlet, suggests she was correct.
In 1967 the magazine wrote that “65% of the young set had already gone over.” The Playboy first featured a bikini on its cover in 1962. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue debuted two years later.
This increasing popularity was reinforced by its appearance in contemporary movies like How to Stuff a Wild Bikini
featuring Annette Funicello and One Million Years B.C featuring Raquel Welch. Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida and Jane Russell helped the growing popularity of bikinis further. Pin-up posters of Monroe and Mansfield and of Hayworth, Bardot and Raquel Welch distributed around the world contributed significantly to the popularity of bikini.The 1970s saw the rise of the this lean ideal of female body and models athletic figures like Cheryl Tiegs, who possessed the athletic figure that, for the most part, remains in vogue today. The fitness boom of the 1980s, lead by icons like Jane Fonda, led to one of the biggest leaps in the evolution of the bikini. According to the observations of Mills, “The leg line became superhigh, the front was superlow, and the straps were superthin.” That body ideal was carried further by supermodels like Elle Macpherson, who is known as “the Body” and has featured six times on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the one-piece suit made a big comeback. In France, Réard’s swimsuit company folded in 1988, four years after the death of Réard whose life of persuading manufacturers who plagiarized his invention ended in 1984.
As skin cancer awareness grew and a simpler aesthetic defined fashion in the 1990s, the skimpy bikini took a nosedive in popularity. This new body ideal was epitomized by icons like surf star Malia Jones, who appeared on June 1997 cover of Shape Magazine wearing a halter top two-piece built for rough water.