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Kominicki: The history behind the bikini


True, the original seems downright chaste when compared to the strings-and-a-couple-of-vees I’ve seen on the beach lately, but it was hot stuff in its time. So hot, in fact, that its inventor, Louis Réard, couldn’t find a model who dared wear it. He had to settle for a stripper from the Casino de Paris.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Credit for the first two-piece, navel-baring swimsuit properly goes to Jacques Heim, a fortysomething Parisian who had inherited his family’s fur boutique. Looking to boost business in the summer of 1946, Heim devised what he called the Atome, a suit so small it was justifiably named after the world’s smallest particle.

(This was before they’d discovered quarks and leptons.)

Across town, young Réard – an engineer by training – was running his mother’s shoe shop and wanted in on the fun. Just weeks after the Atome’s debut, he unveiled his own shockingly revealing outfit, made from a scant 30 inches of fabric and dubbed “smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world.” A genuine bikini, he boasted, could be pulled through a wedding ring.

Réard took the name from Bikini Atoll, one of the Marshall Islands around which American scientists had begun testing nuclear devices, usually by blasting old warships into pieces about the size of a quark or lepton. The first Bikini blast took place on July 1, giving Réard an easy headline to play off as his suit went to market later that week.

Réard would have heard about Bikini Atoll many months before. The atomic blast was the first ever announced in advance by the U.S. government, and officials had also gone to some lengths to remove 167 locals from the island, including their chieftain, an amiable fellow named King Juda who said his people were proud to relocate in the interest of science.

Well, that and a check.

Fun side fact: In local dialect, bikini means “coconut on the surface.”

Additional fun side fact: The first Bikini blast was a bit of a dud. Due to what was later determined to be a flawed tail stabilizer on the bomb, it detonated almost a half-mile off target and sank only five of a fleet of 21 target ships, much to the disappointment of the 114 press observers.

Back in Paris, sales of the bikini soared as French women embraced it, not as a sexual statement, but an expression of freedom, the dawn of what would, 20 years later, be better known as “emancipation.”

There was less emancipating elsewhere. The suit was banned in many neighboring European countries, and it was a decided no-go in America, where bared navels were still not permitted on movie screens. As one fashion writer sniffed, the bikini “reveals everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name.”

Actress Brigitte Bardot agreed to appear in a bikini in the controversial 1956 Roger Vadim film “And God Created Woman,” dramatically boosting both swimsuit sales and her career, although the Vatican put the movie on its A Ticket To This Is A Ticket to Hell list.

Réard’s creation finally won widespread acceptance in America in the early 1960s, but only after Sports Illustrated put a bikini-clad model on the cover of its annual swimsuit issue.

Eight years after the first Bikini Atoll test, U.S. scientists went back to detonate the first hydrogen bomb, which had been codenamed Castle Bravo. The bomb was supposed to have a yield of about 6 megatons, but scientists had failed to take into consideration the explosive power of the bomb’s uranium fuel core. The resulting blast, of more than 15 megatons, caused widespread radiological contamination, even sickening the crew of a Japanese fishing boat that scientists thought was safely out of range.

One comment

  1. Another gem from John. Now I am off to the beach to enjoy the scenery. When did the one piece (topless) for women become popular in Europe? Why hasn’t it become more popular on this side of the pond?

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