FYI: Who invented the bikini?
'It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.' - Modern Girl Magazine, 1957.
The bikini is 60 years old and it has never looked so young and hip, or been as popular. But it was not always so.
In 1946, Louis Reard, a French automobile engineer, shocked the fashion world when he unleashed a range of revealing two-piece swimsuits. 'My bikini is smaller than the smallest swimsuit,' he proudly declared. Even fashionable, daring Paris blushed.
Reard was fully aware of the impact his creation was going to have; expecting an explosive reaction, he had chosen to name his garment after the Pacific Ocean atoll on which the United States had just carried out its first peacetime nuclear-bomb test.
Reard dropped his bomb in July, having refined the work of compatriot Jacques Heim, a designer for a family-owned furrier who, two months earlier, had introduced the Atome (named for its size) and advertised it as the world's 'smallest bathing suit'.
Splitting the Atome into even smaller components, however, presented Reard with a problem. His design was seen as being so indecent, he could find no self-respecting fashion model daring enough to suffer such a brief encounter. He ended up having to hire Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, as his model.