The Birth of Bikini in 1946
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Birth of the bikini 1964 launched by the
French designer Louis Reard shortly after the USA tested atomic
bomb in the South Pacific.
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The modern bikini was introduced by French
engineer Louis Réard and separately by fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris
in 1946. Réard was a car engineer but by 1946 he was running his mother's
lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergère in Paris. Heim was working on a new
kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to
cover its wearer's navel. In May 1946, he advertised it as the world's
"smallest bathing suit". Réard 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 to wear his design. He ended up hiring Micheline
Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris. That bikini, a
string bikini with a g-string
back of 30 square inches of cloth with
newspaper type print, was introduced on July 5 at Piscine Molitor, a public
pool in Paris. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini
received 50,000 letters. Heim's design was the first worn on the beach, but the
design was given its name by Réard. In advertisements he kept the bikini alive
by declaring that a two-piece wasn't a genuine bikini "unless it could be
pulled through a wedding ring. French newspaper Le Figaro who has been generally well respected in post–World
War II France 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.
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