her companions, she had on a two-piece swimsuit – but hers was of such diminutive dimensions that she seemed more naked than clothed. Her breasts were modestly concealed behind two triangles of cloth held up by a halter strap tied around the neck. The base of the costume was also cut in the shape of a triangle, the widest spread of which was across the abdomen, leaving most of the hips and all of the thighs entirely bare. Only a thin strip of material connected the points of the triangle around the back, well below the level of the navel.
It was a costume that has since become a standard on our beaches today. But to those present at the Molitor Pool on that hot summer afternoon, it was the height of shamelessness and close to obscene.
Thus the bikini was born. It was the first event of a scandal that continued for twenty years. But for the little-known clothing designer specializing in bathing costumes, it was an event that represented the peak of his endeavours. Born at the very end of the nineteenth century, Louis Réard had restricted his activities to beachwear since the 1930s. His avowed ambition was to dress the celebrities of the time in his costumes, Réard costumes. He did make some contact with Maurice Chevalier, among others.
18 May 1940: A model wears one of the summer’s new bikinis, a fringed toweling affair with a beaded sunhat. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – 607, 1940. Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Getty Images.
The bombshell that exploded the bikini onto the scene had been set up a long time beforehand, with meticulous preparation. At first, Réard tried to persuade his usual models to take part in his pool-side show. They all refused point-blank, scandalized in particular by the back of the bikini bottom, which left almost all the buttocks uncovered. So Réard was well aware in advance of the outraged reaction likely to follow the pleasure he would gain by presenting his latest collection.
But he soon found a suitable model in Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer at the Casino de Paris. She would certainly feel dressed, even in the skimpiest bikini. All that was left was for Réard to find an appropriate location in which to present his new costume – and that was not so easy. But on July 2 he read a report in France Soir about a fashion parade held on the plane right between Paris and Moscow, during which “stewardesses” walked up and down the aisle dressed in two-piece outfits in different colours, under the astounded gaze of the passengers.
It was in light of this that Réard decided to put on his own show during a beauty contest. The midday edition of France Soir on July 5 accordingly invited the public to attend the Molitor Pool that very afternoon, where the title of “most beautiful swimmer” would be competed for by gorgeous models and shapely sporting stars under the eyes of a select panel of judges. The prize was to be the Réard Cup – which makes it clear to us now what the real object of the whole exercise at the pool was.
Réard was also obliged to cast around for a memorable name to call his revolutionary two-piece swimsuits. Recent world events, specifically the nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll – the paradisal isles of the Southern Seas – gave him an excellent pretext.
Several fashion-design historians have suggested that Réard’s bikini was, in fact, named in the light of another recent creation. The celebrated couturier Jacques Heim had the temerity to present – in that same summer of 1946 – a two-piece outfit he called Atome. The base of the outfit, different from the customary style for such two-pieces, substituted a rectangular piece of cloth across the hips. Unusual as it was, though, it was nothing like Réard’s provocative bikini. It covered the navel (the modesty boundary of the 1940s) and thus required quite a lot more cloth in its manufacture. The only “daring” thing about it was that Heim, as a celebrated designer, had put his own name to it in front of the world. Yet by doing so, he was genuinely associating himself with the more scandalous and rebellious elements in society: those prepared to undermine the accepted rules without openly flouting them.
And it does seem that Heim’s Atome was designed before Réard’s bikini. The French fashion magazine Fémina reported in its special July-August holiday edition: “Every now and then Jacques Heim shows us what a special talent he has for swimwear. It was he who, a long time ago now, brought the Tahitian-style pareo to our beaches. Now, in harmony with the mood of the times, he presents his latest… his latest… (What can we call it? The word ‘costume’ is surely too much for it.) His latest beachwear, which he calls the Atome – see the picture below…”.
Atomic bomb explosion over the Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Written account of the “Most Beautiful Swimmer” contest of 1946. July 6, 1946.
Both Heim and Réard took their inspiration from political history of the era, for during the first days of the year 1946 the newspapers were full of the most detailed reports of the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. It was almost as if a sort of madness had taken over, in which everything was somehow linked with the bomb and its explosive power. Seductive actresses and movie stars were suddenly (and from then on) described as “blonde bombshells on an atomic scale”, suggesting that they exuded the torrid heat of sexuality with nuclear force. The word “atomic” was used as an intensifying adjective in virtually every context.
And to some extent Heim could not but be affected by this – although it is also true that his first thoughts for names for his two-piece outfits focused on the themes of reduction and division anyhow.
Réard reinforced this idea, supporting it by christening his creation after the islands so fully and emotively described in the newspapers: the tropical archipelago in the Southern Seas. The name Bikini presented Réard with many possibilities, for it held within it many different connotations. It referred to a particular time and date, and yet was modern and ongoing; it evoked notions of swimming in a tropical paradise; and it came to represent a costume for a seductive beauty who revealed much of her skin with all the supposed innocence of a native Pacific islander.
Later, the name of this bathing costume of considerably reduced dimensions would be credited with even further linguistic meaning. Tongue-in-cheek, designers equated the initial syllable bi- with the Latin prefix bi- “twice over, two” (which was certainly not the meaning in the atolls name) in order to derive (with execrable etymological inconsistency) such models as the monokini (which has a Greek prefix) and the trikini.
The name also took on something of a sexual connotation which, in a very real way, became implicit in the cultural behaviour of a stratum of society, a metaphor for the improvement of life in general. During the entire second half of the twentieth century the word “bikini” was associated with a particular attitude, a particular image, a particular lifestyle.
It would surely be possible, in a convoluted pseudo-psychological thesis, to prove the existence of a strange link between, on the one hand, a murderous weapon and, on the other, a girl wearing a sexy bathing costume. The apparent confusion between a symbol of death and an image of love might perhaps have added to the fascinations that we already enjoy in literature, where a name or a title can change all or reveal all.
But that afternoon of July 5, 1946 only marks the beginning of our story about the bikini. Not one of the protagonists in the events of that day had any notion of what was to follow. The temperature at the Molitor Pool reached 35 °C (96°F). The roguishly profane Micheline Bernardini in her sensational two-piece swimsuit winked at the photographers as their cameras flashed incontinently. And at length the beauty contest came to an end.
Map of the Bikini Atoll.
That evening, the girl’s photo showing her with the Réard Cup (actually a silver bowl) in her hand, would appear in France Soir. Thereafter, she would disappear
