sneek peek

Come on, we all know what a bikini is...if there is anyone out there who needs an introduction, well...a bikini is a women's swimsuit with two parts, one covering the magnificent breast and the other, the groin (aka the perfume garden - more about this on another post) and, optionally, part or all of the buttocks, leaving an uncovered area between the two. Damn! How did I manage to write it in such a technical format?! It is often worn in hot weather, while pretending to swim or sunning. 

Predecessors of the bikini date back to antiquity in Çatalhöyük and the Greco-Roman world. There have been a few artwork dating back to the Diocletian period in Villa Romana del Casale that depicts women in garments resembling bikinis in mosaics on the floor (pic above). The images of ten women, exercising in clothing that would pass as bikinis today, are the most replicated mosaic among the 37 million colored tiles at the site. Archeological finds in Pompeii shows the Roman goddess Venus wearing a bikini. A statue of Venus in a bikini was found in a cupboard in the southwest corner in Casa della Venere, others were found in the front hall. 

The groundwork for the modern bikini began to be laid in 1907, when Australian swimmer and performer Annette Kellerman was arrested on a Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting one-piece swimsuit, which became an accepted beach attire for women by 1910. In 1913, inspired by the introduction of women into Olympic swimming, designer Carl Jantzen made the first functional two-piece, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves on top. By the 1930s, necklines plunged at the back, sleeves disappeared and sides were cut away. Then, the fun began with new materials latex and nylon and by 1934 the swimsuit started hugging the body and had shoulder straps to lower for tanning. 

It wasn't until a French (of course it is!) engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946 that made it modern. Réard, a car engineer was running his mother's lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergeres in Paris and Heim was working on a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer's navel. In May 1946, he advertised it as the world's 'smallest bathing suit'. Réard named his swimsuit the 'bikini', taking the name from the Bikini Atoll. Réard sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as 'smaller than the smallest swimsuit'. All this is good and well but Réard could not find a model to wear his design and ended up hiring a nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to wear his piece That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back of 30sq/in of cloth with newspaper type printed across, was introduced on July 5 at a public pool in Paris. After that, its all history...