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This summer of 2024, Dua Lipa strolls through the streets of New York City with her shirt open. Beneath her unbuttoned garment, the singer evokes the holiday spirit with a black bikini top. Created over 70 years ago, the micro-triangle made waves before becoming a wardrobe essential, even far from the beach.
Its story begins in the city center of Paris. On July 5, 1938, the Molitor swimming pool hosted its famous “Water Festival .” A tradition since 1914, the competition’s mission is to elect the prettiest bather. That year, amidst the usual high-waisted panties and full-coverage bras, a young woman stepped forward with her navel exposed to present a work never before seen. The ensemble, designed by Louis Réard, consisted of two triangles concealing the chest , accompanied by two other low-cut polygons as bottoms. For the first time, hips and navel were proudly displayed.
The bikini shatters the codes of the era
In the early 1940s, models paraded scantily clad at Molitor ever since couturier Jacques Heim had the idea of cutting the conventional swimsuit into two separate pieces. Named Atome , his 1932 creation dressed the body in a full-coverage bra, paired with high-waisted boyshorts that carefully concealed the lower abdomen, flanks, and buttocks.
The pin-up girl’s favorite outfit turns out to be more modest than those who wear it, notes Louis Réard. Having invested in the development of his mother’s hosiery business, this automotive engineer observed women rolling up their bathing suits to better expose themselves to the sun’s rays. He then set out to make their beachwear fit into less than a square meter of fabric.
Facing the refusal of professional models to expose their curves in this way, the designer called on Micheline Bernardini, a 19-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, to walk in front of the Molitor jury. Anticipating the headlines on her little swimsuit, he chose a canvas printed with press articles. For the name, he also anticipated the fallout from his audacity. Louis Réard chose “bikini,” in reference to the atoll in the Marshall Islands where the United States conducted its nuclear tests. His slogan was already ready: “ The bikini, the first anatomic bomb .”
Who made the bikini popular?
As expected, the effect was explosive , and the mini two-piece was quickly banned from most European beaches (with the exception of our Mediterranean coasts). Its bad reputation spread to the United States, where even Hollywood banned it in the name of puritanism. Yet women have been sporting the bikini since… Antiquity. In a fresco at the Villa del Casale in Sicily, mosaics show Roman athletes with their navels exposed, in bandeaus and low-rise briefs.
While Louis Réard thickened the edges of his swimsuit to save sales, the film industry delivered the long-awaited success to its cutouts almost ten years later. In 1953, during the Cannes Film Festival, Brigitte Bardot brought the BB myth to life in a floral bikini, before making a splash on screen in a white two-piece in And God Created… Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956). Across the Atlantic, Marilyn Monroe participated in its popularization at the same time, until the legendary emergence of Ursula Andress in James Bond 007 against Dr. No (Terence Young, 1963).
Bikini bottoms are all the rage on the seaside, but also on the radio waves with a Brian Hyland song covered by Dalida: Itsi bitsti tini ouini, tout petit, petit bikini . The designer brand, for its part, took on water after the death of Louis Réard in the 1980s, before attempting a comeback in 2017 without success. A symbol of sexual liberation in the late 1960s that became a fashion item in its own right, the bikini has definitively cut the cord.
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