The emergence of the modern bikini was due to the French engineer Louis Reard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946. Reard was a road engineer, but in 1946 he led the lingerie boutique, owned by his mother. Heim was working on a new type of suit beach. The costume consisted of two parts, but the lower part was still large enough to cover the navel. In May 1949, he advertised his bathing suit as "the world's smallest," and gave him the name "Atom."

The explosion in the fashion world

In the summer of 1949 at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific held a new test of the atomic bomb. Historians have concluded that Reard named his bathing suit "bikini" because he thought that his frank style will produce among the people reaction, similar to that which produced the explosion of the US atomic bomb in Japan the previous summer.

Reard made the lower part of the swimsuit lower, and advertised his suit, saying he was "smaller than the smallest bathing suit". In the end, he hired as a model Micheline Bernardini, a dancer from the Paris casino, which is usually danced naked. Bikini, which he put on it, is a small piece of fabric with ropes, with a pattern in the form of newspaper text. This swimsuit he presented on July 5 in a public pool in Paris Piscine Molitor.

Business Rearda took off. He said that is not a separate swimsuit bikini, if you do not pass through a wedding ring. The French newspaper Le Figaro wrote: "For women bikini meant something like a second liberation. There was nothing sexual. It was a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys of life. "

But worldwide sales rose bikini is not because women remained faithful to the traditional split swimsuit. Reard back to the design of conventional underpants, to sell them in the shop of the mother. Actress in movies such as "My favorite brunette" (1947) and the model on the cover of LIFE magazine in 1948 did not appear in a bikini, but in ordinary separate bathing suits.

Only for the brave

Brigitte Bardot

In 1950, in an interview with TIME, American tycoon Fred Cole, owner of Cole of California, which produces swimwear, said with some disdain for the famous French bikini, because they are designed for frail Gallic women.

"The French girls short legs," - explained Cole. "Swimwear should be raised on either side, their legs seemed longer." One writer described the bikini as "a swimsuit in two parts, which opens in the girl everything but the maiden name of her mother."

Kevin Jones, a fashion historian, believed that Reard ahead of his time by 15 or 20 years. Only advanced women, mostly European women of the upper class, take it, as well as European women of the upper class who refused to corsets after the First World War.

Brigitte Bardot wore a bikini at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953, becoming the first star of the festival in a bikini. Despite the inconsistency of this swimsuit, some in France admired the "naughty girls who graced our sun-drenched beaches."

Bardot, who has also appeared in a bikini in the film "And God Created Woman" (1956), has contributed to the popularization of the bikini in Europe, making Saint Tropez the world capital of bikini.

Marilyn Monroe

Esther Williams, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot used in his career as a swimwear demonstrate their sexual attractiveness. Cannes played a crucial role in the career of Bard, who, in turn, played a crucial role in promoting the festival, mainly due to the photos in a bikini at first it appears at the festival.

However, in 1959, Anne Cole swimwear designer and daughter of Fred Cole, said Brigitte Bardot on the bikini: "This is on the brink of impropriety." American Girl Magazine magazine in 1957, wrote that "it is hardly necessary to throw to the wind the words of the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl, possessing tact and propriety, wore such a thing."

Bikini better to take in parts of Europe, where they were worn by film stars such as the 1950s, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren. Eastern Europe, in which the rules of atheistic communism, too, took a bikini. But the three neighboring countries France - Spain, Portugal and Italy - have banned bikinis, as well as many American states. In July 1959 the New York Post has decided to look for a bikini in New York and found a couple. Writer Meredith Hall wrote in his memoirs that until 1965 for appearing in a bikini on the beach Hampton Beach, in New Hampshire, you could get a subpoena.

By the end of the decade there was the fashion for strapless styles, which supports the breast with the help of stones or drawstrings, and became popular swimwear consisting of two parts, laid bare shoulders, which are called "little sinner." But the biggest controversy caused a bikini with a strap around the neck, as they opened too much. These bikinis even expelled from the fashion shows in Sydney for the indiscretion.

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