| In the summer of 1996, I travelled to Italy with a girlfriend and we spent a week on the Italian Riviera.
Surrounded by waving palm fronds and the aqua blue sea, I soaked up the Mediterranean sun in my trusty old one-piece black Speedo. Immediately, as I lay in the sweltering heat, I was envious of my friend, who looked cool and comfortable in her cute red-checkered two-piece.
Looking around, I noticed all the women on the beach were wearing two-piece bikinis -– women of varying shapes and sizes, of whom none seemed concerned about the bulges that wiggled and jiggled as they strutted their stuff.
The next day I went out and bought my very first bikini. It was incredibly freeing as I sunned my virgin skin. I didn’t care that the beer belly I had given birth to hung over the elastic waistband. And, what do you know – no one else did either.
French fashion designer Jacques Heim can technically be credited with designing the bikini. He introduced his two-piece, the Atome, in 1946. He marketed his design as "the world’s smallest bathing suit," but unfortunately for Heim, French designer and engineer Louis Reard launched his itsy bitsy bikini two months later and marketed it as the "Bikini – smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit in the world." What distinguished the bikini from other two-pieces that existed was its miniscule size. Reard declared that a bikini wasn’t a bikini "unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring." He named his design after the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where the U.S. tested hydrogen and nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958. Reard believed his new design would cause a similar explosion in the fashion world.
The bikini was unveiled in Paris, but not to the explosive response that Reard anticipated. In fact, he had to hire a showgirl named Micheline Bernardini to model the bikini, since no reputable fashion model of the time would dare. However, after the horrors of World War II, as people returned to the beaches for the simple pleasures of the sun and the sea, the bikini was soon welcomed by women from the Catholic countries of Italy, Portugal and Spain.
Although the bikini signified a sense of liberation for women, authorities begged to differ and banned the fashion item. Despite its scandalous repercussions, the bikini became a sensation around the world in the 1950s and 1960s, as Hollywood began to embrace the look. The curvy bodies of Diana Dors, Jayne Mansfield and Brigitte Bardot helped heighten the bikini’s popularity. The release of Brian Hyland’s "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" in 1960 rocketed the bikini into a pop culture icon, and the bikini finally reached the top when it appeared on model Babette March in 1964 on the cover of the first Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
60 years since its debut, the bikini still comes in different styles, sizes and colours to compliment a variety of female body shapes and is still one of the few fashion items that allow a woman to legally bare it all in public. |
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