On July 5, 2017, the quintessential two-piece celebrated a significant anniversary. Its history has swept along with sex scandals , appearances on the big screen, and shifts in popular morality. In 1946, French couturier Louis Réard officially presented the first two-piece swimsuit, which gradually became one of the sexiest and most beloved garments in the history of women's fashion: the bikini.
The origins of the bikini
The so-called “ two-piece ” owes its name to the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands , where the United States was conducting atomic bomb testing at the same time . Reard believed that the introduction of this new type of swimsuit would have similar explosive and disruptive effects. Reard's design refined the work of Jacques Heim , who, two months earlier, had introduced the Atome (so-called because of its small size), advertised as the smallest swimsuit in the world. Reard made the Atome even smaller, but initially failed to find a model who dared to wear it. He ended up hiring Micheline Bernardini , a stripper at the Casino de Paris, as a model.
The appearance on the big screen
The advent of the bikini, beyond the fashion trends it sparked, represented a true revolution in the way we think and see women. In 1951, during the Miss World pageant , the bikini was associated with bad taste, so it was banned and replaced by a one-piece, fully covering swimsuit, which was therefore more in keeping with good taste and the image of women of the early 50s.
The invention of the bikini didn't immediately gain acceptance; it would take several years for it to appear on beaches, and only in the late 50s and 60s did few modern women dare to wear one. In the 60s, the bikini became popular: this new trend was linked more to ethical than aesthetic concerns. It was mainly thanks to the push of cinema with its starlets, the media, and the political and social openness of the West that the bikini gradually began to gain popularity.
The popularization of the bikini
Thanks to famous female characters such as Marilyn Monroe, Ursula Andress , Brigitte Bardot and Sofia Loren, the bikini arrived on the big screen, making it increasingly welcome among " ordinary women " who in those years, especially in Italy, continued to wear only one-piece swimsuits, as highlighting one's curves, revealing the hips, belly and rear end was a real taboo . But in the 70s, the bikini became the quintessential women's beachwear item, and just 10 years later came the triangle bikini with the thong , a slip composed of a triangular front section of fabric and a thin strip at the back. In the same decade, attention also began to be paid to fabrics that became increasingly high-performance, elastic, and technical, moving from cotton to Lycra to the iridescent fibers of the new millennium.
Today the bikini is no longer just a swimwear item but a trendy and showy garment, which is why every year designers from all over the world present collections full of new features such as: sequins, bright colours and bands, push-up or balconette bras, knotted or lace-up briefs and much more.
Emanuela Ferrara
