Bikini creator drops a bombshell

July 25th, 2007

On this day in 1945: French engineer Louis Réard, along with fashion designer Jacques Heim, launch a new swimming costume, a two piece consisting of just 70cm² of cloth. Réard named it after Bikini Atoll, a nuclear test site, hoping his invention would cause just as great a splash. The swimsuit was so scandalous that no model was willing to wear it onstage, so Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris.

At least that’s the story. But Heim is also stated as Réard’s rival, and had released his own two-piece swimsuit, the Atome, two months earlier. To compound matters, not only are there images of two piece swimsuits in antiquity (Greek women being especially fond of them), but Réard and Heim almost certainly took their idea from local girls who were already fashioning their own home-made bikinis. On top of that, Dorothy Lamour appeared in a two piece swimsuit in the 1937 film Hurricane, which may well have been pushing the Hays Code ban on exposed navels as far as allowable. While sometimes derided as an instant failure, the fact that youths were already wearing these suggests it was simply a niche fashion until adopted by the cultural powerhouse that is the USA.

Originally I was only posting this for the notable science tie-in (and a gratuitous picture, I’d hoped), but it turned out for such a small piece of clothing, the bikini has a long and interesting history.

Entry Filed under: General

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