Bikini
A bikini is usually a women's abbreviated two-piece swimsuit with a bra top for the chest and underwear cut below the navel. The basic design is simple: two triangles of fabric on top cover the woman's breasts and two triangles of fabric on the bottom cover the groin in front and the buttocks in back. The size of a bikini bottom can range from full pelvic coverage to a revealing thong or G-string design.
The name for the bikini design was coined in 1946 by Parisian engineer Louis Réard, the designer of the bikini. He named the swimsuit after Bikini Atoll, where testing on the atomic bomb was taking place. Fashion designer Jacques Heim,
also from Paris, re-released a similar design earlier that same year,
the Atome. Due to its controversial and revealing design, the bikini was
slow to be adopted. In many countries it was banned from beaches and
public places.While still considered risqué, the bikini gradually became a part of popular culture when film stars—Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welch, Ursula Andress and others—began wearing them on public beaches and in film.
The bikini design became common in most Western countries by the mid-1960s as beachwear, swimwear and underwear. By the late 20th century it had become common as sportswear in sports such as beach volleyball and bodybuilding. Variations of the term are used to describe stylistic variations for promotional purposes and industry classifications, including monokini, microkini, tankini, trikini, pubikini, and skirtini. A man's brief swimsuit may also be referred to as a bikini. Similarly, a variety of men's and women's underwear types are described as bikini underwear.
The bikini has gradually grown to gain wide acceptance in Western society. By the early 2000s, bikinis had become a US$811 million business annually, and boosted spin-off services such as bikini waxing and sun tanning.
Modern bikini
With the fabric shortage still in place and in an endeavour to resurrect swimwear sales, two French designers – Jacques Heim and Louis Réard – almost simultaneously launched their new two-piece swimsuit ranges in 1946.Heim launched his two-piece swimsuit in Paris which he called the atome, after the smallest known particle of matter.He advertised the Atome as the world's "smallest bathing suit". At about the same time, Louis Réard created a competing two-piece swimsuit design, which he called the bikini.
Although briefer than the two-piece swimsuits of the 1930s, the
bottom of Heim's new two-piece beach costume still covered the wearer's
navel. Réard's bikini undercut Heim's atome in its
brevity. His initial design consisted of a bra and two triangular pieces
of newspaper-type print fabric connected by strips of material. He
sliced the top off Heim's bottoms. The Bikini, with a total area of 30
square inches (200 cm2) of cloth, was advertised as "smaller than the smallest swimsuit". When he was unable to find a model willing to showcase his revealing design, Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, a 19-year old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris. Bernardini received 50,000 fan letters, many of them from men.
Réard said that "like the [atom] bomb, the bikini is small and devastating". Fashion writer Diana Vreeland described the bikini as the "atom bomb of fashion". In advertisements he declared the swimsuit could not be 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."
Heim's atome was more attuned to the sense of propriety of the
1940s and a bigger hit than Réard's design but Réard's was the design
that won the public's imagination over time.Though Heim's design was the first worn on the beach and sold more
swimsuits, it was Réard's description of the two-piece swimsuit as a bikini that stuck, Modern bikinis were first made of cotton and jersey.
