The glorious separated pieces of small tiny fabric held together by strings and other things that we commonly refer to as the Bikini, was invented nearly 72 years ago by a French engineer named Louis Réard. Réard was a mechanical engineer who had through a twist of fate, taken over his mother’s lingerie business and become a fashion designer. He had noticed that women were rolling up the edges of their cumbersome swimsuits in order to get better suntans during a visit to St. Tropez Beach on the French Riviera. So he decided that he would try to come up with a better design that would make sunbathing more enjoyable for women. And that he did.
Réard took the name “Bikini” from the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands where the atomic bomb testing was taking place. He is quoted as saying that he chose the name because he wanted the risqué two-piece swimsuits to shock the world into hysteria the same way the atomic bomb tests had done. Another Parisian fashion designer, named Jacques Helm, released a similar swimsuit design a few months later to rival Réard’s bikini design called the “Atome”, named after a recently discovered atomic particle. Soon, the fight over whose teeny weenie swimsuit would capture the world stage was on.
Before long, Réard’s design, which was much smaller than Helm’s, began winning the battle. His Bikini’s were so tiny, that he had trouble finding anyone to model them and eventually had to hire a burlesque dancer named Micheline Bernardini from the famed Casino de Paris to wear the swimsuits for the newspaper reporters.
Micheline Bernardini,
wearing Louis Reard's original Bikini for reporters on
July 5th, 1946.
Photo: Louis Malle
13