The “Able” nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll on 1 July 1946, the first of twenty-three such tests at the atoll. A mushroom cloud rises above a coral atoll.
22 July 2022
The two-piece women’s bathing suit takes its name from Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Marshallese name for the atoll is Pikinni, a compound of pik (surface) + ni (coconut). The shift in pronunciation between the Marshallese and English words is due to the fact that the phonemes /p/ and /b/ are both bilabial plosives and easily swapped for one another. The precise significance of the name is not certain, but presumably, the atoll had an abundance of coconuts.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted twenty-three nuclear weapons tests on and around Bikini Atoll. The inhabitants were forcibly removed prior to the first test and because of lingering radiation have not been able to return to this day.
In May 1946, French fashion designer Jacques Heim introduced a two-piece bathing suit that he dubbed the atome, because it was so small. Not to be outdone, on 5 July, only four days after the first of the atomic tests in the South Pacific, competing designer Louis Réard debuted a skimpier suit that he dubbed the bikini. Because the suit was so revealing, the regular models refused to wear it on the runway, so Réard hired a nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to model it at his show.
The fashion debut got little notice in the English-language press at first—after all, two-piece bathing suits were not new; the bikini was only notable for its lack of coverage, in more ways than one. The European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, however, ran several articles about it at the time, including this satirical piece published on 6 July 1946, the day after Bernardini sashayed down the runway:
The Foreign Ministers of Great Britain, France, the United States and Soviet Russia reached agreement on reparations on the eve of a new international complications, namely, the world’s smallest bathing suit. The suit is divided into two zones, the northern zone and the southern zone. The northern zone is divided into two enclaves. Designated as the Bikini, the suit, when not worn, is carried in a blue box one and a half inches square. Experts appointed are studying the report that the suit may be passed through an ordinary finger ring. The suit has not been put on the agenda, but there is general agreement that it looks snappy on Micheline Bernardini.
Micheline Bernardini modeling the original Bikini swimsuit in July 1946. Black and white photo of a woman standing beside a swimming pool wearing a two-piece bathing suit and high heels.
But by the following year, bikini began appearing in press articles, at first specifically in reference to Réard’s design, and soon in reference to any skimpy, two-piece suit. This United Press piece, about another Paris fashion show, appeared in a number of U.S. papers on 22 June 1947:
First came the famous Bikini model, worn by a shapely blonde. The Bikini model consists of three small triangles of cloth.
And this one from the San Francisco Chronicle of 16 November 1947 uses bikini more generically:
At St. Tropez last summer many young people slipped out of their “bikinis” and canoed and pedalboated about off shore in their birthday suits. The red-faced police pursued them in motorboats.
Puritanical Anglophones were not the only ones to object to the swimsuit. The August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré had this to say about the design:
Bikini, ce mot cinglant comme l'explosion même [...] correspondait au niveau du vêtement de plage à un anéantissement de la surface vêtue; à une minimisation extrême de la pudeur.
(Bikini, this word, as stinging as the explosion itself, […] likened the degree of covering by the beachwear to an annihilation of the clothed surface; an extreme minimization of modesty.)
And some were blunter, as this letter to London’s Picture Post of 28 April 1951 testifies:
Soon the beaches will be swarming again. Let us defend them against immorality. Forbid by law two-piece bathing suits for females—Bikinis, and all the disgusting rest. Let us keep our beaches safe for our children: not let them become scenes of living pornography for our dirty old men.
In retrospect, the debut of the bikini was a significant sociological milestone, and its metaphorical name was highly appropriate. Thomas Cole wrote of the fashion debut in 2011:
Though juxtaposed to the atome, bikini has an even more shocking and atomic effect. Moreover, Réard’s choice of name contains the nuclear threat within the sexily clad and controllable woman’s body.
Of course, by today’s standards Réard’s 1946 design was relatively staid. We have become inured to the annihilation of modesty, just as we have become inured to the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Sources:
Cole, Thomas G. (The) Bikini: EmBodying the Bomb. Genders, 53, Spring 2011.
Hannay, Evelyn. “To All Appearances—Resort Fashions Bow In.” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 November 1947, 13S. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Hardman, Cedric. “Ban the Binkinis” (letter). Picture Post (London), 28 April 1951, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938-1957.
Loehwing, David A., United Press. “Unexpected Peel Causes Slip in Breathless Tightrope Act.” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia), 22 June 1947, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bikini, n.
“Paris Bares World’s Smallest Bathing Suit and Consensus from Every Angle Is—Wow!” New York Herald Tribune (European Edition), 6 July 1946, 4. Gale Primary Sources: International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887-2013.
Photo credits: U.S. Army Air Forces, 1 July 1946. Library of Congress. Public domain image; unknown photographer, 1946, Hulton Archive, fair use of a low-resolution scan to illustrate the topic under discussion.