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July 5, 1946: Réard’s line-up with Micheline Bernardini at the Molitor Pool in Paris for the title of “Most Beautiful Swimmer”, (detail).

July 5, 1946: Réard’s line-up with Micheline Bernardini at the Molitor Pool in Paris for the title of “Most Beautiful Swimmer”.

On July 1, 1946, at 9 o’clock in the morning, an atomic bomb exploded with a force of 23,000 tons above Bikini, a coral atoll in the South Pacific hitherto virtually unheard of. More than six disarmed warships of the Japanese and American fleets were sunk and more than twice that number were seriously damaged.

Weather conditions were ideal for the test; the sky was clear and there was no wind at all. All at once, an enormous column of smoke towered above the archipelago. At the foot of it was what seemed like a ball of fire. At first blindingly white, it then turned orange, wine-red, and finally greyish green. The cloud of smoke – some 33,000 feet (10,000 metres) high, according to onlooking aircraft pilots’ estimates – was regularly penetrated by radio-controlled planes containing live guinea-pigs and banks of highly sensitive scientific measuring apparatus.

This was the first “official” nuclear experiment since the end of World War II, in which the bombs dropped so devastatingly on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All the major newspapers made much of its effects on the paradise that had been the Southern Seas, their reports motivated, at least partially, by propaganda. The United States, the sole atomic power of the age, was demonstrating to its Soviet adversaries the terrifying extent of that power.

Incorporated into that propaganda were rumours about the bomb’s potentially destructive effect on the planet. These were rumours spread at informal levels that kept circulating due to genuine fears and concerns. Yet the world continued on as it always had, and humanity very soon felt confident enough to declare in a French newspaper that, “the Earth has not been turned to liquid, the sky not become streaked with flames, the oceans not dried up into rocky deserts.”

The Deligny Pool in Paris on July 1, 1946. The two-piece models were hardly economical with cloth, as would have been appropriate for that era.

All the same, from a military point of view, the outcome – apart from finding out what the atomic bomb was capable of when exploded over water – was nothing less than a complete fiasco. By no means all of the target ships, painted bright yellow and orange for the occasion, had been sunk, and the primary target vessel, the battleship Nevada, had mostly escaped damage altogether. The Soviet Russian observers, admitted to the atoll by the Americans, left smirking. Grudgingly, a US admiral conceded that the bomb should only be used against maritime targets in combination with some other more detonative weapon, a torpedo, perhaps.

American hopes for the test results were thus frustrated, and accordingly, the name “Bikini” became familiar all over the world shorn of any of its potentially frightening connotations.

Only four days later, on July 5, in a public swimming pool in Paris where a beauty contest was in process, there was a minor sensation. Of only slightly scandalous value, it was nonetheless enough to make the term bikini famous forever. The promoter of the beauty contest, a certain Louis Réard, a clothing designer, used the opportunity to introduce his own latest creation. Even before the contest judges’ final verdict, a number of spectators around the edge of the pool had been remarking on how one of the girls (who had been particularly careful to remain facing the audience, as if rapt in thought) had extraordinarily little on. When this girl was then summoned up to the podium as one of the finalists selected by the jury, a murmur of appreciation ran like lightning through the assembly. It was a reaction not to the girl’s own beauty or her personality, but to the costume she was wearing.

Like 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 back into oblivion. But with no concern at all for the girl or her victory, Micheline Bernardini was posing for the same photographers at the same time. Smiling brightly, one leg carefully in front of the other, she had climbed onto an upturned crate and had assumed the stance of the celebrated Statue of Liberty that welcomes new arrivals across the Atlantic in the New York harbour.

That first bikini had an astonishing impact in terms of the material. What seemed from a distance to be cloth with a pattern on it – flowers perhaps – turned out on closer inspection to be a collage of newspaper cuttings and headlines. The bikini, thus, took every advantage of the media uproar it was bound to provoke, using every means it had in hand.

This light-hearted, yet explicitly knowing gesture by the designer could not emphasize more perfectly the complexity of ways in which this tiny costume would be important. Fashionable and contemporary, shocking by being the least it could possibly be, the bikini, nonetheless – from the very first photo shoot, and in the most public way – set itself up as being far more than it truly was: a scrap of cloth in which a person could go swimming. It embodied fashion’s ideals to be more than just an item of clothing, to tell a story, to emanate an aura of imagination and mystique around itself and around the person wearing it.

Fashion, after all, is nothing without a human body on which to display it. It achieves significance only because the human body lends it life and purpose – although the reaction is reciprocal, for the fashionable object also lends the body some of its own qualities. Without clothing, the body is virtually without expression: the body has to rely on movement, on physical activity to be given any attention. Clothing without the body, meanwhile, is a skin that has been sloughed off, an empty envelope.

It was precisely in this that Réard showed his genius, for he imbued his bikini with importance right from the start, integrating publicity for his creation within the creation itself. The creation thus promoted itself too. It was not simply an item of clothing but a dream, and the stuff of dreams besides.

And so, on July 5, 1946, at the very beginning of the Cold War, when an atoll was reduced to ashes and humanity debated the consequences of the coming atomic age, all these considerations were for an instant concentrated in the lens of the camera that took the photo of Micheline Bernardini. The beautiful girl paraded once more in front of the astonished throng, hesitating as it was between applause and loud indignation, and then coquettishly made her exit – but not without one last smile from the back of a changing-room.

On the following day nothing happened. A scandal was brewing in the city of Paris, still sweltering in its 35 °C (96°F), where the inhabitants crowded in amazing numbers around the edges of the swimming pools. Yet in the press there was no mention whatsoever of the incipient scandal of the previous day, neither in the newspapers nor in the fashion magazines.

Photograph of participants for the title of the “Most Beautiful Swimmer”. Paris Press, July 6, 1946.

This was evidently a new kind of scandal altogether, a totally silent one. Nothing was said about it on the following day, the following weeks, the following months, not even the following years. The scandal that was the bikini was just not talked about. Its impact could nonetheless be gauged in the numbers of the articles that shrilly praised all those swimsuits that were different from the “tasteless bikini”. But there was never any picture. Not even a description. You might well believe that the scandal was so serious that the only way to counter it was with utter silence.

Conversely, during that summer of 1946, everybody was talking about Heim’s sensational Atome. It was the first fashion season after the war and the general mood was to celebrate the return of freedom. The fashion magazines duly gave themselves entirely over to Heim’s work.

Publicity for Heim’s “revolutionary” two-piece outfits – featured on streamers towed behind light aircraft carriers over France’s Côte d’Azur, and describing the Atome as “the smallest swimsuit in the world” – was at once parried by Réard (who was of course equally astute in the art of advertising). His slogan was “The bikini – the bathing costume even smaller than the smallest swimsuit in the world.” Women and girls on the beaches followed the trend, even if they did not buy Réard’s costumes: it was not difficult, after all, with some deft tucks to adapt a classic two-piece costume at home and turn it into what looked like a bikini that showed almost as much bare skin as the original. It was not until 1954 that Réard was finally allowed advertising space, in the Vogue summer special.

In fact, the magazine had not remained silent on the subject for all the intervening period. In 1948 it had expressed its own opinions on the thorny matter, commenting, also, that current beachwear was distinctly improving, and even returning to some pretensions of elegance.

The colours and materials of the extremely brief two-piece costumes were undoubtedly nice to see. But, if we may say so, those who wore them had something of the look of shipwreck survivors, haphazardly covered in scraps and tatters of cloth no larger than a handkerchief.

Nuclear testing on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, July 1, 1946.

Symbols

Our bomb is the blossoming out, the natural expression in all its truth and glory, of our society – just as Plato’s Dialogues were the expression of the ancient Greek polis, as the Coliseum was of ancient Rome, as Raphael’s Madonnas were of Renaissance Italy, as the gondolas were of aristocratic Venice, as the tarantellas were of certain rustic but musical Mediterranean communities… and as the extermination camps are for our petty-minded bureaucracy which seems already to contain a rabid desire for atomic suicide.

This paragraph, written by Elsa Moranle (“For and Against the Atomic Bomb”, Conference at the Teatro Carignano, Turin), claims to pinpoint the image that identifies and characterizes our times. It is that of the atomic explosion and its mushroom-shaped cloud – an image in which all the mental and technological efforts of the past two and a half centuries of “progress” are concentrated, representing both goal and result. But the words also throw light on another side of our civilization: the accompanying desire in our frenetic activities for self-destruction. Like a poisonous mushroom, the atomic bomb has become the symbol for the last 50 years. It shines like an artificial “orange, wine-red, green, and light grey” sun over empty beaches. When humanity ate for the second time the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, humans got nothing better or more spiritual out of it than the introduction into this “other Eden, demi-Paradise” a series of scientifically applied atomic tests. But what satisfaction there was on the faces of those lit up by the artificial sun! What pleasure there was in finally having at one’s command a weapon that could affect the collective suicide of humanity! What a blessed relief it was to know that it all might no longer exist – the world, humankind, life, dreams and aspirations – and that if things did not measure up and a better future could not be foreseen, one could at least annihilate everything at the press of a button. “An apple from the Garden of Eden” might well describe the circular steel construction designed during World War II and the cheerfully christened Gilda, an image of the perfect woman painted on its outside casting. The term might also be applied to the space-probe sent a few decades later into the depths of the universe containing within it an outline sketch of the human form. Humanity, looking to exterminate itself while yet seeking to preserve the memory of its life-form among distant galaxies, resembles nothing more than a spoiled child who has not received the birthday present longed for, and so in a tantrum destroys all the rest.

Jacques Heim examines his sketches for the “Maid of Cotton 1962”.

Jacques Heim

Jacques Heim was born in Paris in 1899, the son of Isidore and Jeanne Heim, Polish-Jewish immigrants who had already acquired French nationality and set up, in their home at 48 Rue Laffitte, a fashion house under the name Heim. It soon counted among its clientele Madame de Toulouse-Lautrec, Madame Claude Debussy, Her Majesty Queen Victoria-Eugenia of Spain (wife of King Alfonso XIV) and a number of other celebrated women. After World War I, Isidore Heim began to produce fur capes made of rabbit skin – a significant innovation in the world of fashion – and thereby attracted the custom of another doyenne of contemporary society, Coco Chanel, who greatly admired his work.

In time, and following an education biased towards design, Jacques Heim found himself entrusted with the side of the business devoted to “young fashion”. He presented his first collection in 1931. Three years later, the Heim fashion house moved to the Champs Élysées and also opened junior branches in London, Biarritz, Cannes, Deauville and Rio de Janeiro. In August 1936, the shop transferred to the Avenue Matignon, which became the registered address of Jacques Heim’s many publications, notably the Revue Heim, followed by the Gazette Matignon.

Just before World War II, Jacques Heim tried to escape across the Channel to England, but was interned in Spain until the end of the hostilities. In 1949, having returned to Paris, he set up a company called Parfums Jacques Heim and, until his death in 1967, remained one of the pivotal personalities in the Paris fashion world. His work is generally considered a model of classic elegance.

Particularly important was his major contribution in the field of beachwear and summer clothes. He was the first to utilize cotton in haute couture in 1934 and dreamed up a beach ensemble inspired by the Tahitian pareo (skirt or loincloth). In 1946, he created the two-piece Atome – since unjustly forgotten – which might certainly be regarded as the immediate precursor to the bikini.

Jacqueline Maraney (20), secretary, winner of the “Most Beautiful Swimmer” competition on June 26, 1948.

1957, French swimwear designer Louis Réard sits with two models. Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Louis Réard

Born in Paris in 1897, Louis Réard began to design beachwear that appealed at once to his wealthy and somewhat worldly clientele in the 1930s. Indeed, his declared goal was to dress “the beautiful, the rich, and the fortunate” in a style appropriate for them to enjoy the sandy shoreline. If the publicity material about his 1950s bathing costumes, which he himself disseminated, is in any way to be believed, he then sprang to worldwide fame from nowhere. But the fact is that in the eyes of the official world of fashion (in which swimsuits were regarded as of fleeting and secondary importance, and they generally still are), Réard’s ascent was hardly noticed, despite the fame and success he undoubtedly achieved. In the august salons de couture in the Avenue Matignon – where members of royal families and the aristocracy themselves paid their respects in order to try on a new hat or a pair of silk gloves – such ideas as his seemed more or less frivolous.

So when in 1946 his bikini broke all the standard rules of good taste, all the moral norms accepted by clothiers around the globe, it made little difference to the general disdain in which the fashionable crowd already held him. Réard had nonetheless patented his design ahead of the market, and when the name bikini became the recognized general term for a particular style of costume, he acted at once. Every unwarranted use of the name of that style registered under the patent number 19431 – even if it was merely a mention in some newspaper article, such as the one in which the name bikini was applied to a two-piece outfit that came up as high as the navel – was followed by immediate legal action.

It may well have been this extraordinary effort to protect his “copyright” that took Réard beyond the barrier, as far as the world of high fashion was concerned. It may also have contributed greatly to the curious fact that after 1946 – when the name bikini had become a word of virtually universal familiarity – the name Réard dropped out of sight altogether. There was not a single press review of the sensational line-up at the Molitor Pool on July 5, 1946; not a single article on the life and works of the bikini’s creator. Réard’s final infiltration into the world of fashion was greeted in stony silence – a silence that, if anything, spread to bestow even further obscurity upon him.

His name is now rarely to be found in the histories of fashion, and when it is, it is simply as “the inventor of the bikini”. The best reference sources give his life-dates (1897–1984) and the probable locations of his birth (Paris or Lille) and death (Lausanne), but nothing else.

Shortly before his death, a well-known American magazine asked if it might interview “the father of the bikini”. Even Réard himself seemed surprised. In a photo that shows him in a sort of classroom scene together with a tailor’s dummy dressed in a bikini, the old man smiles rather hesitantly at the lens, half-turned to one side and peering over his glasses across the top of one shoulder. Was he, himself, astonished at all the kerfuffle stirred up by his simple little bathing costume? Perhaps he believed he could have received such celebrity fifty years earlier? But other than in this strange smile – the latest and last official record we have of Réard – he has disappeared once and for all.

Nothing is known any more about the different collections he presented during the 1950s and 1960s which he intended to embody the evolution of the bikini. No details are forthcoming about his life, other than that he continued to reside in the heart of Paris. There are, however, one or two odd pictures scattered among the larger photo agencies, without captions or commentary – silent and fragmentary footnotes to his work.

And there are a couple of anecdotal stories. The first bikinis were sold in what looked like matchboxes, emphasizing not only how small the costume was but how scandalous it might seem. On the top of these matchboxes was the legend “Maximum 45 centimetres (18 inches) of material” so people knew what they were getting and could not complain about the high price. Obscured by his own creation, Réard disappeared into the shadowy background and into fashion’s mythology.

Beachwear in 1952: fashion parade in the Janika-Bar, Berlin.

Beachwear in 1952: fashion parade in the Janika-Bar, Berlin.

The celebrated Parisian couturier Jacques Heim and his models fly to Vienna to show the women of the city their latest line in clothes, Tailwind (a title suggesting smooth and easy progress forward). The photo shows “the ambassador of fashion” on arrival at the Vienna airport.

Readers of Vogue had to wait until July 1948 to see the first two-piece costume. Even then, it appeared without accompanying text as an illustration in an advertisement for the latest Helena Rubinstein sun cream. Was it a genuine bikini or a classic number that, by convention, covered the navel? Impossible to tell. The model in the ad had a sash knotted around her waist.

Other magazines, such as Fémina, simply mentioned Heim, whose more conventional work was already beginning to cause some disquiet: “Are there any items of clothing that stand out particularly? Costumes? Well, this year it is on the beach that women are revealing all. Jacques Heim’s latest creation he calls the Atome – and the name describes its size very aptly. A little too revealing? Indecently so? What can we say? The costume covers everything that should be covered. On the other hand, it shows everything – and how it shows everything! – that can be shown.”

The most popular women’s magazine of the time was Elle. Its headline on July 9 read “At Cannes, the women are wearing the trousers this year!” In the same issue, the magazine showed some pictures of beach scenes (including, among others, one of a swimmer in an audaciously brief two-piece costume). Elle carefully spoke only of “two-piece costumes” and did not name the bikini as such, but managed, nonetheless, to report on the latest swimwear trends: “Dressed to the nines, women this year are taking to wearing trousers. Less formally dressed, women are wearing virtually nothing at all…”.

On July 23, the magazine found it necessary to declare a complete turnaround, a radical change in its opinion of swimwear. Accompanying pictures featured only small two-piece costumes, while at the end of the article, the caption under a photo of a one-piece costume read, “The exception: a swimsuit comprising just one element.”

Three weeks later a knitting pattern for making a one-piece costume was printed under the subheading “For those who do not like two-piece costumes.”

It was in this way that two-piece bathing costumes, at this rather late stage, but hereafter forever, took on the status of standard beachwear and favourite of swimmers.

French couturier Jacques Heim’s evening dress for the “Maid of Cotton 1962”, Penne Percy. The long cotton dress is decorated with large flowers printed upon it in colour. It was first featured on June 19, 1962 in Deauville, on the occasion of the International Cotton Convention.

A Réard bikini, 1949.

Symbols II

After years of Cold War strategies and of rivalry in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, we might now prefer – especially in light of the less oppressive world perspective at the turn of the millennium – to choose a different symbol of the atomic age that began with Hiroshima. The bikini perhaps, for, in its carefree style and its naturalistic display of corporeal realities, certainly chimes well with what we imagine of the early post-war years and the mentality that prevailed at the time. A girl smiling among palm trees with a bottle of sun lotion in her hand is an image as well entrenched in folklore as any standard postcard. It is in this form that we now perceive what was a blind enthusiasm for the burgeoning atomic age, was equally blind to the potentially cataclysmic effects of releasing such energies. Through the striking metaphor that this era conceived in representing the bomb as a sex symbol, an image of our desire for life (a woman’s body in its divine perfection) blends with the representation of our measureless desire for destruction (an atomic bomb in its simple streamlined perfection). Not that the bikini is the symbol that best represents the era. It represents, rather, the other side of the atomic mushroom-cloud which, at the beginning of current history, rose above the paradise of the Southern Seas. It is as if we wanted to swap over our two deepest desires – for life and for death – and were striving to obscure the marked differences that distinguish them, by the passion with which we pursue them (the passion with which we go to war, the passion with which we climb into the bed of a beauty before or after such a war). If we could now bring ourselves to see these as “male-oriented disorders” – as generated by a patriarchal society – we might then find it a reassuring change from a state of things in which woman is for some reason failing to play the role assigned to her with the self-sacrificial devotion that man wants to discern in her. That is the kind of role depicted as an image of her painted on the rounded outer-casing of an atomic bomb or on the hot sands of an island in the Southern Seas.

A Réard bikini, May 1, 1956.

A Réard bikini, May 18, 1956.

Strangely, any scandal that surrounded the bikini never reached the text pages of the magazines. On the contrary, magazines at this time tended to concentrate instead on such problematical questions as “Is my marriage in danger if I go on vacation by myself?” and “Should I take my children on holiday to the seaside?” They likewise gave full instructions on how you could make your costume for a masked ball out of old curtains.

So, despite everything, there were only one or two scattered insinuations that there might have been a scandal going on somewhere behind closed doors. A French journalist wrote, “This summer you do not just take your clothes off at the seaside – you give a full navel review!” No one seemed to have the courage to come out and confront the theme of nudity. Vogue, as always, thought there would be only one burning question this season: “Should a girl wear a hat or not?”

But mindsets were changing. And the covers of the weekly magazine Elle showed how much they were changing. On June 25, the headline was “Holiday-time at last!” and the picture was of the buxom torso of a Rita-Hayworth-style blonde in a one-piece blue costume. On each side was an equally blonde young girl in a one-piece costume, representing a daughter. This family, idyll in several ways, took a downhill turn over the following two weeks as it presented women of a more mature age-group who attracted attention only by their unusual hairstyle or headdress (a coronet apparently made of buckles, for instance, or a sun-hat outlined in bright red and black circles).

The cover of the July 16 issue was distinctly different. It showed a girl in a straw hat wearing transparent overalls and holding a kitten in her arms. The background was rustic, featuring bales of hay, pitchforks, hay-carts, and so forth.

On July 23, any attempt at a family scenario had vanished. In full colour, the front cover again presented a seductive blonde. This time she was wearing a two-piece costume very similar to a bikini somewhat hidden beneath a Tahitian-style pareo, with a fishing-rod in one hand and a scoop-net in the other. What was visible of the costume – white with red streaks – was highly effective, emphasizing the girl’s very feminine figure and clearly suggesting sexual connotation, heightened by the symbolism of her “fishing”. The scoop-net, in form not unlike a butterfly-net, was evidently meant to represent the nebulous contrast between vulnerable innocence and seductive charm (appropriate to a “fisher of men”).

A variation on this cover picture, featuring the same girl, appeared in an advertisement for “Your Daily Paper” France Soir. On this occasion, the beautiful damsel laid on the edge of a swimming pool, taking an afternoon siesta. To one side of her, lying there casually, a pair of trainers. Her half-open pareo afforded a glimpse of the bottom of a classic swimsuit covering the navel.

This was the first time (certainly in France) that a magazine cover deliberately used what was actually a pin-up picture in addressing its usual readers, who were of course mainly housewives, secretaries, and working women. And it represents an eloquent proof of the stunning change – which took place over a matter of a few weeks – in the way women were portrayed. All mocking opposition, any suggestion of public outrage, had evidently faded away altogether.

It was only toward the end of that year that women’s magazines really discovered the pleasures of summertime. Thereafter, their pages were full of hot-weather recipes and instructions on sunbathing. It was then, too, that advertisements for sun oils and barrier creams as well as slimming products, first made an appearance.

The new emphasis involving such increased publicity makes it much easier now to trace the further spread of the briefer version of the two-piece bathing costume.

A line-drawing advertisement in the issue of Elle, dated July 16, drawing the public’s attention to a sun cream which utilized the power of “Uviol”. It claimed to be “the sun cream that guarantees you a tan like a Creole’s,” and showed a beautiful woman largely unclothed – and with navel exposed.

Later in the summer of 1947, the same magazine contained the first advertisement for natural slimming. “Slim without medication and without regular dieting,” it warbled alluringly, while proposing a course of treatment based on seaweed algae. In the same issue, the writers suggested that women readying to take their summer vacation should “sculpt their bodies for the beach” with the help of special gymnastic exercises. Moreover, users of certain other creams and potions mentioned in related articles are promised “firmness of bosom.” “Do you want a bigger bust? You can have one – if you use our breast-tensioning cream.” Other articles actually detailed dietary regimes for slimming. And still, others gave “prescriptions for sunbathing”, outlining to their evidently inexperienced readers the secrets of sun-tanning: the optimal times of exposure for different types of skin, together with suitable protective measures against the sun’s forceful radiation.

It was at this time in France that the first publicity material appeared for the bathing sites along the Côte d’Azur. Whole sections of magazines were devoted to it, featuring the coastal locations as unbeatable holiday resorts for people from inland regions of the country. Not to go to visit them would be to turn one’s vacation plans into a waking nightmare.

Holidays, sunshine, beaches – in their way, these were indications of the progressive spread of brief two-piece bathing costumes. Special care of the legs, the bust, and the skin, protection against the sun, and methods for slimming, all very clearly reflected the evolution of a new cult of the body evidently promoted by the ever greater areas of visible skin. “The legs of a statue and the bosom of Venus” were the height of ambition for many bathers in a bikini, who now had to be concerned with her appearance in a way very different from when she had worn a one-piece garment.

Bikini from the Réard collection, June 12, 1949.

Micheline Bernardini in Louis Réard’s original bikini. The photo records the handwritten dedication “To the talented artist M. Réard. A souvenir from Molitor, Micheline Bernardini.”

But there is another way to track the rise of the two-piece costume’s predominance, apart from via the fashion magazines. Despite the previously mentioned issue of Elle, dated July 30, 1946, which provided a knitting pattern for a one-piece costume “for those who do not like two-piece costumes”, the magazine increased its printing for those interested in two-piece costumes. Throughout 1947, the magazine was chock-full of instructions on how to sew together two-piece costumes for women and swimming trunks “for husband and/or son” in cotton, using 100 grams of lemon yellow cotton fabric.

Line-drawings and other illustrations from the same year show groups of bathers, among whom all the women are wearing two-piece costumes that leave the navel exposed.

On June 22, sewing instructions were published for a two-piece costume in red and white using 175 grams of cotton. Two weeks later, in the issue dated July 5, there was a photo of a bather in a genuine Réard bikini. And two weeks later still, there was the first bikini cartoon. A matronly woman in a two-piece, practically non-existent, costume tries to breast-feed a squalling infant, while two young damsels of ethereal beauty dressed in brief bathing costumes pass close by her – and appear not to see anything unusual at all.

For the whole of this period, Vogue remained reactionary and conservative, going merely as far as to present a two-piece costume by Schiaparelli in which the material was lined and slightly padded, and which covered more than it left showing. The only costume that remotely resembled the bikini was the one in the Helena Rubinstein ad for sun cream. At the same time, the prestigious magazine was regrettably prepared to provide misinformation; it claimed that women in general considered the short two-piece costumes repellent. Especially loathed was the bikini, the very name of which women hated and regarded as devilish. It was not too devilish for Vogue to bring itself to print, apparently, provided it was accompanied by sharply disparaging words. The magazine went on in its peremptory fashion to state that the bikini was being altogether shunned, and expressed its relief that in time to come, when beachwear had once more turned to less provocative styles, the immoral bikini (which it had said no one was wearing) would – God be praised – be outcast once and for all.

It was in a remarkably similar spirit, during the summer of 1948, that the magazine reported that formal evening wear was beginning to relax and show a bit more skin. In an unexpected reversal of status, the bikini – that swimsuit reduced to no more than two scraps of cloth – was now beginning to claim the modesty that until this time belonged to the evening dress, while the evening dress, in revenge, was wilfully giving up its virtue.

The “two scraps of cloth” cliché suggesting immorally insufficient cover for parts of the body with sexual connotations very plainly demonstrates the magazine’s opinion of Réard’s creation.

It was the end of 1950 before Vogue started to print regular features on beachwear fashion. Reports might then in considerable detail inform readers, for example, of beach cloaks and ponchos, illustrated with models by Rochas, Dior, and Schiaparelli.

In the same year, a new feature entitled “The Joys of Sunshine” appeared, and showed all kinds of summer costumes – even if the subheading “The joys of the water” then depicted outfits for going sailing in rather more imaginative swimming costumes.

Sport was something Vogue was always advising women to enjoy – in moderation. Sport – exercise for young people that may initially be strenuous, before years of discretion are reached and activities are better regulated, until they finally become no more than a strict health-routine – is one of the secrets of beauty.

The tone of a matriarch’s solemnly wise counsel is all too evident. Yet the cotton manufacturers had better reason to be unhappy at the bikini’s success. The arrival of synthetic materials, and particularly nylon – of which the bikini had immediately been made – constituted a real threat to the cotton industry. That industry now felt obliged to widely advertise the advantages of cotton, and specifically for swimming costumes. It was cheap to use, it required and responded to artistry, it was light, and it retained heat when in the water.

In parallel, the advantages of a one-piece costume were contrasted with more revealing swimsuits. It was certainly more practical to swim in than a bikini – and to illustrate this, the same publication featured the extraordinary “Harakiri costume”, a one-piece creation by Calixte for Marguerite Monsenergue. It was a costume that had a wide slot at the level of the stomach: once in the water, the swimmer could pull a slide across, therefore opening the costume and facilitating movement. The opening, which looked rather like a shark’s mouth in the middle of the costume, strikes us as ludicrous today.

But all these efforts of resistance on the part of groups in the fashion world who never accepted Réard, nonetheless contributed to a significant change in fashion itself.

With the introduction of Dior’s New Look, the diversity of materials became an essential trait of contemporary fashion after years of wartime restrictions and scarcity. “We had just endured a period of war”, Christian Dior would later write, “a period of uniforms, and of women in those uniforms which gave them all uniformly the shape of prize-fighters. I used to dream of women delicate as flowers, with slender shoulders, their necklines low and cut with the fine curves of lianas, their skirts flared wide like the petals of flowers.”

Réard’s reductionist concept, which had corresponded so well with the notions of freedom, suddenly became no more than the product of its era, unattached to current trends. For the guardians of morals in the fashion world, such a fate for it was indeed welcome.

Réard and his creation were thus relegated to the shadows.

In 1965 Réard dreamed up an even briefer costume than the bikini: the sexy-bikini, precursor of the Rio-style thong.

Atomic Inspiration

In the beginning, on July 1, 1946, the atomic tests on the Bikini Atoll were reported in just one single French newspaper. The scientific correspondents in the testing area wrote down all the details of everything they saw but, on running out of what they believed to be of general interest, they did not hesitate to exaggerate on details. The paper France Soir thus spent several days discussing the fate of the animals exposed to the atomic blast – pigs, mice, and goats. On July 2, banner headlines announced that the mice placed well within the mushroom-shaped cloud had triumphantly survived the experience. July 3’s headlines read “PIGS ALL OK!” But in the same edition a few pages further and under a heading in very small type, an article mentioned that the state of health of the mice was now deteriorating – their hair was falling out and they were turning yellow. On July 3, readers in Paris learned that another sort of bomb had gone off – American movie star Rita Hayworth, in her latest film, was “emanating the torrid heat of an atomic explosion”. Miss Hayworth at this time did not yet truly qualify as a “sex bomb” herself but was attributed explosive qualities on account of wearing a single-piece costume that accentuated her curvaceous form, hyperbolically described somewhere as “the most perfectly powerful weapon of war since Creation.” Two days after the real atomic explosion, the Americans sent two marine artists by air to the scene to depict its “torrid heat.” Various newspapers took to printing in question-and-answer form what selected celebrities said they would have done if the Bikini bomb had destroyed the world. Environmental experts meanwhile informed readers of how the Coral Sea and the islands (and the scientific establishment) would take on an “atomic architecture” following the blast at Bikini. It was in this frenzied atmosphere that Réard found the inspiration that was to lead him to christen his two-piece swimsuits that generated scandal. The initial presentation of the costume was planned with meticulous foresight. Réard sponsored a prize at the Molitor Pool for “the most beautiful girl-swimmer.” A brief photo-report in the France Soir of July 2 no doubt confirmed him in his intentions. Its evening edition reported on a fashion parade that had taken place in mid-air on a Paris-New York flight. Stewardesses with shapely legs had promenaded up and down the central aisle under the stupefied gaze of the passengers. Then came July 5. It was a day on which there was genuinely “torrid heat,” for the temperature was 35 °C (96°F) in the shade. Everything conspired to scribe Réard’s bikini on the collective conscious once and for all – tremendous heat imaginably as an echo of the atomic explosion, exotic sands, and the seductive silhouette of a native girl with long legs, bronzing her skin between the sun and the sea. The legend of the bikini was born.