The Bikini is 61 years old this year...

Eighteen year old Brigitte Bardot, at the beginning of her career, leans over on the deck of a boat and looks up at the camera, Sitting she teases, tosses her hair, and gives a toothy smile

The bikini is at retirement age and now is 61 years old

From Correspondent Bob in the Bikini trench's
MALIBU (BOB) -- It's hard to imagine that there was once a beach without a bikini-clad woman in sight.

Sixty one years ago the world of fashion was changed forever with the introduction of the first two-piece bathing suit -- the bikini.

French engineer and designer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim both developed the concept of a two-piece bathing suit around the same time in Paris in 1946 and Réard introduced the new design on July 5 at a fashion show at the Piscine Molitor in Paris. It was a string bikini with a g-string back. It was named after Bikini Atoll.

Louis Reard named his skimpy bathing invention after the South Pacific bikini atoll where the atomic bomb was being tested in World War II. Other aspects of the war, historians say, paved the way for the new beachwear.

To help in the war effort, women left the kitchen, purchased shoes and went to work outside the home. This new-found personal and economic freedom was not lost on fashion designers.

However, women in Paris were wearing such items of clothing as the microkini one year before the bikini was "invented".

Fashion expert Adrian Butash, who is writing a book about the bikini, says Reard wasn't the first to design two-piece swimwear.

"The bikini was born in Paris in 1946, right after World War II. It was invented by two gentlemen. Now the most acclaimed at this time is Louis Reard, who is a wonderful designer and an entrepreneur and a show man," Butash said.

But Reard's bikini had a progenitor invented by another Parisian -- Jacques Heim.

"Heim actually produced a two piece bathing suit, a costume for the beach . . . about four or five months before Louis Reard," according to Butash.
Reard gets credit

But Reard's showmanship outgunned the far more reserved Heim, and it was Reard's bikini that shook the world at the Paris fashion show.

"None of the girls would model it, none of the top models at the time. It was too controversial," Butash said.

Reard finally found a nude dancer Micheline Bernardini who was willing to be the first person to wear the bikini. But the bikini was so controversial, it needed something more than a fashion show to get respectable women to wear it.

The French Bikini



If anybody must get credit for popularizing the bikini in the world it is French actress Brigitte Bardot. The bikini becomes such an integral part of Bardot's career that she becomes The Bikini Girl, a title which perhaps derives from her leading role in the movie Manina, La Fille San Voiles (Manina, the Girl without a Veil) and later retitled simply "The Girl in the Bikini". The Bikini Girl,the first to wear that title.


In the late 1950s, actress Brigitte Bardot created a sensation by wearing a bikini in the 1958 film "And God Created Woman."



The fashion revolution was now under way, and even got its own anthem: "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."

"The women themselves love bikinis, because they are liberating and women love their bodies," Butash said.

Some women agree.

"I think it was more liberation. I think it's great that women could go on the beach and have their own sense of style," one bikini-wearing woman said.

"I think some historians take it too far. It created an opportunity for a woman to have a sort of freedom in terms of feeling comfortable with their body in public, another woman said.









Sexy Bikini's here

Some info and pictures from BikiniScience.com