From Swimwear to Bikini

From Swimwear to Bikini
@Asim Deb

Title Photo: 1916
On 5th July 1946, the French designer Louis Reard launched a two-piece swimsuit at the Paris Piscine Molitor swimming pool. The designer picked up Its name “bikini” from the US atomic test off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week. To promote his new design, he hired skywriters to fly above the Mediterranean resort advertising the Atome as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Not to be outdone by Heim, Réard hired his own skywriters three weeks later to fly over the French Riviera advertising his design as “smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world.” Louis Réard, who had recently taken over his mother’s lingerie business, knew that the two-piece would make considerable impact, so he aptly named it after Bikini Atoll – the test site for the atomic bomb located in the South Pacific. He then hired skywriters to fly over the French Riviera advertising his design as “smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world”. Not bad for a relative novice.

Réard was a mechanical engineer who had taken over his mother’s lingerie business in 1940 and became a costume designer. On St. Tropez beaches, he noticed women rolling up the edges of their swimsuits to get a better tan, which inspired him to design a popular swimsuit.

He had the initial trouble to find a model to wear the new two-piece but Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris, had no qualms about appearing nearly nude in public.

Reard printed advertisements on 5th July 1946 with Bernardini as the model at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was an instant hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.

In 1946, Western Europeans greeted the first war-free summer in years, and French designers came up with fashions to match the liberated mood of their people. French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Reard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called this the “atom” and advertised it as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Made out of a just 30 inches of fabric, Reard promoted his creation as “smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit.”

French women welcomed the design but the Catholic Church, some media, and a majority of the public thought the design was scandalous. Contestants in the first Miss World Beauty Pageant wore them in 1951, but the bikini was then banned from the competition. Actress Brigitte Bardot could draw attention when she was photographed wearing a bikini on the beach during the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. Other actresses, like Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner received press attention when they wore bikinis. During the early 1960s, the design appeared on the cover of Playboy and Sports Illustrated, giving it additional legitimacy. In 1962 James Bond movie Dr. No, actress Ursula Andress made a huge impact when she emerged from the surf wearing what is now might be called as an iconic bikini. The dear skin bikini worn by Raquel Welch in her film One Million Year BC (1966) made her a global sex symbol and was described as a definitive look of the 1960s.

Going into the History:
Evidence of women’s bikini clothing has been found in as early as 5600 BC. Illustrations of women wearing bikini-like garments during competitive athletic events in the Roman era have been found in several locations, the most famous is at Villa Romana del Castle.

Pre-Roman

In the Chalcolithic era of around 5600 BC, the mother-goddess of Catalhoyuk, a large ancient settlement in southern Anatolia, was depicted astride two leopards while wearing a bikini-like costume. Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes are depicted on Greek urns and paintings dating back to 1400 BC. Ancient Greek women wore a breastband called mastodeton or an apodesmos.

Artwork dating back to the Diocletian period (286–305 AD) in Villa Romana del Casale (Sicily) excavated by Gino Vinicio Gentili in 1950–60, depicts women in garments resembling bikinis in floor mosaics. Images of ten women, dubbed the “Bikini Girls”, exercising in clothing that would pass as bikinis today, are the most replicated mosaic among the 37 million colored tiles at the site. In the artwork “Coronation of the Winner” of floor mosaic in the Chamber of the Ten Maidens (Sala delle Dieci Ragazze in Italian) the bikini girls are depicted weight-lifting, discus throwing, and running. Some activities depicted have been described as dancing, as their bodies resemble dancers rather than athletes.

Some academics maintain that the nearby image of Eros, the primordial God of Lust, Love, and Intercourse, was added later, demonstrating bikini with the erotic. Similar mosaics were discovered in Tellaro in northern Italy and Patti, another part of Sicily. Images of Roman female sex workers were found wearing costumes similar to the Bikini Girls.

In 1907, Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann was arrested on Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting sleeveless one-piece knitted swimming tights that covered her from neck to toe, a costume she adopted from England, although it became accepted swimsuit attire for women in parts of Europe by 1910. Even in 1943, pictures of the Kellerman swimsuit were produced as evidence of indecency in Esquire v. Walker, Postmaster General. Harper’s Bazaar published in June 1920 (vol. 55, no. 6, p. 138) – “Annette Kellerman Bathing Attire is distinguished by an incomparable, daring beauty of fit that always remains refined.” The following year, in June 1921 (vol. 54, no. 2504, p. 101) it wrote that these bathing suits were “famous … for their perfect fit and exquisite, plastic beauty of line.”

1912 summer Olympics introduced female swimming. In 1913, inspired by that breakthrough, designer Carl Jantzen made the first functional two-piece swimwear, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves on top. 1912 silent film “The Water Nymph” saw Mabel Normand in revealing attire, and this was followed in “Sennett Bathing Beauties” (1915–1929). In 1915, the word “swimsuit” was coined by Jantzen Knitting Mills, a sweater manufacturer who launched the Red Diving Girl swimwear brand. In 1916, the first annual bathing suit day at New York’s Madison Square Garden became a landmark. The swimsuit apron, a design for early swimwear, disappeared by 1918, leaving a tunic covering the shorts.

During the 1920s and 1930s, people began to shift from “taking in the water” to “taking in the sun”, and swimsuit designs shifted to more decorative features. The 1929 film “Man with a Movie Camera” shows Russian women wearing early two-piece swimsuits exposing their midriff, and a few who are topless. Actress Dolores del Rio was the first major star to wear a two-piece women’s bathing suit onscreen in “Flying Down to Rio” (1933).

In the 1930s, the European women first began wearing the two-piece bathing suits that consisted of a halter top and shorts. During World War, in Europe, fortified coastlines and Allied invasions curtailed beach life during the war, and swimsuit development, like everything else non-military, came to a standstill.

The 1934 film “Fashions of 1934” featured chorus girls wearing two-piece modern bikinis. In 1934, a National Recreation Association study on the use of leisure time found that swimming, encouraged by the freedom of movement the new swimwear designs provided, was second only to movies in popularity as free time activity out of a list of 94 activities. In 1935 American designer Claire McCardell cut out the side panels of a maillot-style bathing suit, the bikini’s forerunner. The 1938 invention of the Telescopic Watersuit in shirred elastic cotton ushered into the end the era of wool. Cotton sun-tops, printed with palm trees, and silk or rayon pyjamas, usually with a blouse top, became popular by 1939.

Wartime production during World War II required vast amounts of cotton, silk, nylon, wool, leather, and rubber. Fabric shortage continued for some time after the end of the war. In 1942 the United States issued Regulation L-85, cutting the use of natural fibers in clothing, and mandating a 10% reduction in the amount of fabric in women’s beachwear. To comply with the regulations, swimsuit manufacturers produced two-piece suits with bare midriffs. And by that time, two-piece swimsuits were frequent on American beaches In the summer of 1941 Rita Hayworth featured on the cover of Life magazine (1941) sitting on the beach in a white two-piece with a bared midriff although her navel remained covered.

Following the trend, on 5th July 1946, the French designer Louis Reard launched a two-piece swimsuit at the Paris Piscine Molitor swimming pool. Its name “bikini” was taken from the US atomic test off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week.

In America, the bikini was not so socially accepted until the early 1960s, when a new emphasis on youthful liberation brought the swimsuit en masse to U.S. beaches. It was immortalized by the pop singer Brian Hyland, who sang “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” in 1960. However, bikini gradually grew to gain wide acceptance in the western society. According to French fashion historian Olivier Saillard, the bikini is perhaps the most popular type of female beachwear around the globe because of “the power of women, and not the power of fashion”. As he explains, “The emancipation of swimwear has always been linked to the emancipation of women”. By the early 2000s, bikinis made US$811 million business annually.

Thus, the world’s shortest fashion costume had to go through so many changes of its concepts and designs.

(Source : HCC, HTC, Encyc.com).
http://lolawho.com/bikini-day-jacques-heim-and-louis-reard/
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bikini-introduced

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