Things You Didn't Know About The Garment That Revolutionized The Fashion World

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Few garments have caused such a stir in fashion history as the bikini and today, which is the national day of this swimsuit, we celebrate it by reviewing and revealing some of the most curious facts of its 71 years of history.

On this day in 1946, the French engineer Louis Réard presented the world with the two-piece swimsuit "smaller than the smallest swimsuit in the world," reports Time magazine, in a beauty contest held at the swimming pool of the Molitor hotel in Paris.

At that time the size and design were so scandalous that the designer could not find a model who dared to present this piece in public, so finally the first woman to wear it was Micheline Bernardini, a 19-year-old erotic dancer who worked in the Paris casino, according to the Getty agency.

In the image, which has already become one of the most mythical in fashion history, Bernardini holds a matchbox in which he assured that the bikini could be kept.

Where does the name come from? Just days before that presentation in Paris, the US military had been testing atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll, a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific, and, according to the same Time report, Réard expected his invention to be so explosive like the US nuclear tests.

Although it was something very novel, the inventor did not have that easy to convince the public with such a risky garment for the time. In fact, before becoming the star of the beaches around the world, the bikini came to be banned in countries such as Belgium, Italy, Australia and Spain and was even declared a sin by the Vatican.

Without a doubt, one of the actresses who most contributed to popularizing the garment was Ursula Andress with her Honey Rider character in the James Bond movie Dr. No. The beige bikini Andress was leaving the sea sold for in 2001 for $ 60,000 at auction and a year later Halle Berry recreated the moment in the movie Die Another Day.