This once highly controversial women’s fashion was outlawed in the U.S. for almost 14 years
Now it’s so popular women across the globe wear it faithfully(and it was designed by a former mechanical engineer)
When French architect Lucien Pollet was asked to design a swimming pool and hotel complex to be built in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, he created what became one of the city’s most luxurious sites, Piscine Molitor.
Piscine Molitor was known throughout Paris for its avant-garde atmosphere. It was a normal thing to watch wealthy Parisian sunbathers lounging poolside among celebrities.
Johnny Weissmuller, who won five Olympic gold medals in the 1920 Olympics and famous for his role in Tarzan films in the 1930s and 1940s, was invited to Piscine Molitor as the pool’s guest lifeguard.
Piscine Molitor was built during the era of “pleasure pools.” It soon became the place to be seen. And I do mean seen.
Bare breasts were everywhere as women often pulled down their one-piece bathing suits to swim topless. Men sat on deck pool chairs smoking cigarette after cigarette watching the women swim. And the few children who accompanied their parents to the complex would do cannonballs, splashing water on everyone.
It’s really no wonder that Louis Réard picked this place to debut his newly designed women’s bathing suit.
Now you should know that Louis Réard wasn’t a fashion designer by choice. Born in Lille, Nord, France, in 1896, Louis grew up to become a mechanical engineer. And he worked in that position for several years until his mother, Marie Eugénie Dufrenoy asked for his help.
She happened to own a lingerie shop near Les Folies Bergères and wanted Louis to help her run the business, which he did without hesitation. He did so well that by 1940, Louis took over the business completely.
And because of his skills as a mechanical engineer, Louis knew how to put things together. So not only was he running the shop, but he was also designing all sorts of women’s clothing.
When he wasn’t in the shop, you’d find him traveling around France, taking note of what types of clothing women were buying and wearing. These trips often provided him with the inspiration for new designs.
And it was while on a trip to St. Tropez that he noticed something odd about the bathing suits women wore, which inspired Louis to design a new kind of bathing suit.
But if he was going to have any chance of success, he’d have to work rather quickly to bring his design to the marketplace because 1946 was the year of “the bathing suit wars.”
Yet there was another race happening … one that changed world history forever.
Ticking Time Bomb
Back on June 28, 1941, the U.S. embarked on one of the largest scientific research programs the world had ever seen.
For on this day, Executive Order 8807 was signed, which established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). The OSRD was given unlimited resources to develop an atomic bomb.
The country was in a race against Nazi Germany to produce the first ever nuclear bomb. You see three years earlier, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent alarms ringing with their discovery of nuclear fission.
Concerned that Germany would move forward with building an atomic bomb, two Hungarian-born physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner drafted what became known as the Einstein–Szilard letter. In the letter, which was also signed by Albert Einstein they warned of the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type."
That letter was then delivered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who immediately formed a special advisory committee to determine whether it was even possible to develop a nuclear bomb using uranium.
Turns out it was more than possible. Two months later, the committee informed the President that uranium "would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known."
With this knowledge, the committee formed secret facilities spread across the country including in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Red Gate Woods, Illinois, and Richland, Washington. At these facilities scientists worked on different methods to not only extract plutonium from Uranium-235 but also how to harness plutonium’s natural fission into a controllable bomb.
Once they discovered the method that worked best, it was time to test it. And that’s what they set out to do on July 16, 1945. At exactly 5:29 a.m. this group of scientist tested a nuclear bomb code-named Trinity.
The bomb exploded with an energy equivalent to around 20 kilotons of TNT. So great was the implosion that the desert sand melted and became a mildly radioactive light green glass, which was named trinitite.
It also left a crater in the desert 5 feet deep and 30 feet wide. The roar of the shock wave was felt over 100 miles away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles in height.
The U.S. was now in possession of the most powerful military weapon known to man. And they would continue to develop and test more atomic bombs.
In fact in that same year, the U.S. military chose a small atoll (coral reef) to carry out more tests. The atoll was part of several coral reefs that surrounded a 229 square mile lagoon, which made up the Marshal Islands located in the Pacific Ocean.
At the time, the atoll was inhabited by 167 native residents. So Commodore Ben H. Wyatt was given the task of meeting with King Juda, to let him know everyone would be relocated to the nearby neighboring island of Rongerik.
However the King and the residents refused to leave their island. After all, it was their home … a place they had lived since 1914. But pressure from the military was too much and King Juda eventually conceded to the U.S. government’s demands to vacate the island.
He gathered the tribe together and told them, “We will go, believing that everything is in the hands of God.”
And what little island did King Juda rule over Dear Reader? None other than Bikini Atoll
Just Thirty Inches Needed
Of course news of the nuclear bomb testing spread far and wide, even to the beaches of Europe including St.Tropez.
Yes, the same beach that Louis Réard noticed an odd habit women did while sunbathing. In order to get their legs tanner, the sunbathing women would roll up the bottom edges of their one piece bathing suits, which exposed more skin.
Why do this?
Well back then a one-piece swimsuit looked like a very tight, short dress. The bra top resembled a full-coverage bra. The suit then extended down into a tight ‘skirt’ that would cover the backside completely. Skirts were either snug fitting around the hips and thighs or loose, called “swing skirts.”
Some suits bared a little bit of the stomach because a small triangle of fabric was cut out underneath the bust area to show a sliver of skin. However what little bit of skin that did show was always, always, always above the naval.
As Louis watched these women roll up their bathing suits, he got an idea. What if he designed a bathing suit that revealed a lot more skin than the traditional one piece. And what if that suit was made of two pieces instead of one?
When Louis returned to his shop in Paris, he immediately started working on the design for his new two-piece bathing suit, which consisted of just thirty inches of fabric.
The fabric was covered with a newspaper imprint, which he cut into the shape of four triangles. Then he stitched the pieces together to create a top and a bottom.
His two-piece bathing suit was now complete. But he would need to hire a model to wear it. But the suit was so scandalously small that Louis had trouble finding anybody to model it for him.
The only person who was willing to wear his teeny-weeny bathing suit was 19-year-old nude dancer Micheline Bernardini from the Casino de Paris. She put on the four small patches he had strung together, which for the first time in history showed the female belly button.
But Louis wasn’t done yet. Now that he had a model willing to wear his suit, he was going to show it off at the only place in Paris that mattered … Piscine Molitor.
On July 5, 1946, a week before Bastille Day, and three weeks after nuclear bomb testing was done on Bikini Atoll, Micheline stood poolside wearing Louis’s bathing suit while he photographed her.
A curious crowd circled around the two. When someone asked what Micheline was wearing Louis responded, ”the Bikini.” He chose the name because he hoped that the raunchy two-piece would elicit the same shock as the atomic bomb did.
Louis Reard’s bikini bathing suit made headlines throughout Europe. Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast.
It’s even been said that Louis received 50,000 fan letters—mostly from men.
The Bikini Wars
With his new bathing suit making a big splash in the fashion world, other designers rushed to create their own version of the bikini.
In fact rival designer Jacques Heim had already created a bikini-styled bathing suit, which he called “the Atome.” Yes… named after the atomic bomb.
And he used a novel way of advertising his swimsuit. He hired a skywriting plane to write "Atome - the world's smallest bathing suit."
But Louis was not a person to be out done. He put out an advertisements saying that it wasn’t a true bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.”
Louis’ business soared, giving him an annual income of almost $2 million.
One year later, the bikini made its way to the U.S. However, initial sales of the swimsuit were slow. That’s because many Americans were shocked by its scantiness. Heck the bikini was even outlawed as a form of public attire in many U.S. cities. And the ban lasted fourteen years.
It would be the dawning of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s, before American women embraced the bikini. It was helped along by teenage “beach blanket” movies of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, and by the California surfing culture celebrated by pop groups like the Beach Boys.
There was no turning back now. American women (and men) began a love affair with the bikini that has lasted to this day.
The bikini was even immortalized by the pop singer Brian Hyland, who sang “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” in 1960.
Six years after Micheline Bernardini was the first girl in a bikini, Bridgette Bardot made “The Girl in the Bikini.” In 1962, Ursula Andress strode from the surf in “Dr. No” in nothing but a knife and bikini as the original Bond girl.
Now bikinis are sold everywhere. In fact the global swimwear market is worth $21.4 billion. And some experts say the market will hit $30.5 billion by 2028.
And in what is a weird twist of fate, the bikini capital of the world just happens to be the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Just think how daring it was for Micheline to wear those four squares of fabric and how brilliant it was of Louis to assemble a bathing suit that women fully embraced.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“The first thing each morning I put on my bathing suit that way nothing worse can happen the rest of the day.”— Anonymous