Bikini

Two women modeling current bikini versions

The or the bikini or biquini (from the English bikini and this from the place name Bikini, an atoll located in the Pacific) is a Women's swimsuit consisting of a bra and a tight bottom. It was created in 1946 by the French automobile engineer Louis Reard.

Bikini is also called biquini for women's underwear that is smaller than usual, similar to a swimsuit, except for the kind of fabric with which it is made.

Historical background

Mosaic of the Roman village of Casale.

Annette Kellerman in a picture of the film The daughter of the gods 1916.

Although the bikini is a garment of recent creation, similarly designed garments were used in earlier times, although their use was not intended for bathing but for sports. Athletes in Ancient Greece sometimes used a piece of cloth called a mastodeton (in Greek, μαστόδετον), which covered their breasts and was used until the High Middle Ages.

A good number of mosaics from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD have been preserved. C. in which women appear in "bikini", the best known being those of the Roman villa of Casale, Sicily. Similar figures have been found in other parts of the island, as well as in Tellaro, in northern Italy.

In 1913, perhaps influenced by the arrival of women in Olympic swimming, the designer Carl Jantzen made the first two-piece swimsuit, consisting of shorts and a kind of short-sleeved shirt at the back. above.

Already in the 20s and 30s, with the development of new materials, especially latex and nylon, manufacturers began to lower necklines, eliminate sleeves and adjust the female figure. However, the fact of showing the navel in public was still considered indecent.

First moments and evolution

Marilyn Monroe posing for a photograph in 1962 while wearing a bikini.

Bikini according to fashion in 1969

Louis Reard was an automotive engineer who took over his mother's lingerie business in the 1940s and became a clothing designer near Les Folies Bergères in Paris. While on the beaches of Saint Tropez, he noticed that women rolled up the edges of their swimsuits to get a better tan, which inspired him to design a swimsuit with an exposed midriff.

In May 1946, French designer Jacques Heim produced a two-piece bathing suit he called the "Atome" billing it as the "world's smallest swimsuit". The bottom of Heim's swimsuit was large enough to cover above the woman's navel. user. Réard quickly produced her own swimsuit design, which was a strappy bikini consisting of four triangles, two to cover the breasts, one for the upper part of the buttocks and one for the pelvic area, made with only 194 cm² of fabric with newspaper prints.

When Reard wanted to present it in the pool of the Melitor hotel, he found himself with the inconvenience that no professional model dared to wear it in public, finally having to resort to Micheline Bernardini (a stripper from the Casino de Paris), who warned him that the parade scheduled for July 5, 1946 was to be a more powerful bomb than the one that, five days earlier, the United States government had detonated on Bikini Atoll.

The outrageous two-piece didn't really catch on until the 1960s: Brigitte Bardot, fashion icon and sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s, flaunts it for photographers (sometimes even without a bra). on the beaches of Cannes and Saint-Tropez; Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda…; With his song Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini from 1960, Brian Hyland awakens the taste among American adolescents for a garment that, summer after summer, will evolve until it reaches its minimum expression —the microkini— already in the middle of the of the nineties.

While in France it spread rapidly as a symbol of women's liberation, in other countries such as Spain ―in the midst of Franco's Repression―, Italy (also deeply rooted in Catholic morality) or the United States ―strongly rooted in Puritanism―, it took years to be accepted.

Variations

Skirtini.

Since its inception, fashion designers have tweaked the original bikini by creating women's swimwear based on its design. The microkini is the smallest variant and is also made up of two pieces. The monokini (or monobikini) is reduced to the lower half of a bikini.

The skirtini adds a short skirt, or sometimes a panties provided with a frill that makes the same visual effect. The sling bikini is formed by a single piece, a thong that is held by the shoulders through wide straps diverse. Finally, the triquini is basically a bikini whose two pieces are joined in front with a strip or band.

The bikini as a sportswear

The bikini is used in various sports such as athletics, bodybuilding, windsurfing or beach volleyball, after being approved as official clothing for the practice of the latter in 1994 by the FIVB (International Volleyball Federation), although For reasons of comfort and hydrodynamics, most swimmers continue to wear a one-piece swimsuit.