The French Designers And The Origin Of Bikinis

On 5 July 1946, French designer Louis Réard unveiled a daring two-piece swimsuit at Piscine Molitor, a popular Parisian swimming pool. Parisian woman Micheline Bernardini modelled the new fashion, which Réard dubbed the "bikini", inspired by a newsworthy American atomic bomb test earlier that week near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Wearing two-piece swimming costumes

European women first began wearing two-piece bikini swimsuits in the 1930s, consisting of a halter top and shorts, but with only a sliver of midriff showing and the belly button guardedly concealed. In the United States, modest two-piece suits appeared during World War II, when wartime fabric was rationed and skirts and other excess material were removed. Meanwhile, in Europe, fortified coastlines and Allied invasions restricted beach life during the war and the development of swimwear, like other non-military things, came to a standstill.

French designers came up with fashions
In 1946, as Western Europeans rejoiced to welcome the first war-free summer in many years, French designers came up with fashions to match the people's liberated mood. Two French designers, Jacques Haim and Louis Réal, developed competing bikini prototypes. Haim called his bikini 'Atom' and advertised it as 'the smallest swimming costume in the world'. réard's swimming costume, which was essentially a bra and two inverted triangles of cloth connected by strings, was actually much smaller. made from a mere 30 inches of fabric, réard advertised his creation as 'smaller than the smallest swimming costume in the world'. réard called his creation the bikini. named after the bikini atoll.

Ending
When planning the debut of his new swimsuit, Réard had difficulty finding a professional model willing to wear the ugly two-piece. He therefore turned to Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris who had no qualms about appearing almost naked in public.
In a hint of the headlines he knew his swimsuit would generate, he had newspaper type printed on the swimsuit from Kameymall, he modelled for Bernardini at the Morito pool on 5 July. The bikini was a hit, especially among the men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.