The bikini still rocks
WHEN Michelle Bernardini posed for the cameras on July 5, 1946, in swimwear so skimpy it could squeeze into the matchbox she held in her hand, she sparked worldwide outrage – and a fashion trend that has never gone away.
This week, the itsy-bitsy, teenyweeny two-piece celebrated its 70th birthday. And, judging by this week’s pictures of pop star Taylor Swift and her squad of supermodel friends splashing in the sea together, the bikini is as popular as ever.
It’s a telling sign of society’s changing attitudes that when Parisian engineer Louis Reard launched his revolutionary swimweat, the only person he could persuade to wear it was a less-than-respectable nude dancer, whereas today top supermodels make whole careers out of posing in barely-there bikinis – and no one raises an eyebrow.
Indeed, the history of the bikini holds up a fascinating mirror to our times, as well as reflecting how ideas about ideal bodies, shape and size have altered over the years.
Bikinis have showcased the gamut of women’s changing bodies, from the ample bosoms, bottoms and small waists of the Fifties, to the powerful athletic limbs of the Eighties supermodels and the skeletal “heroin chic” models of the Nineties.
The bikini has gone from being a sign of women’s liberation in the Sixties, a literal throwing off of the modest clothing of a conservative era, to a worrying showcase of a new oppression – the rigid diets and plastic surgery that increasing numbers of women succumb to in pursuit of the “body beautiful”.
It is said that Reard, who had taken over his mother’s lingerie business in 1940, came up with the navel-baring two-piece as a response to war rationing and a dictum to use less fabric. But he’d also noticed women rolling back the edges of their cossies on the beach to reveal more flesh and get a better tan.
His solution was to make a garment of four triangles using 76cm2 of material. Knowing his daring design would produce an explosive response, he decided to christen his new swimwear “the bikini” – after the nuclear tests being conducted by the US military at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific.
Reard’s bikini certainly arrived with a bang. His model, Michelle Bernardini, received 50,000 fan letters, the Vatican declared the bikini sinful, and Italy, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Australia banned it.
It seems ironic now that Miss World, a competition that be.came a symbol of oppression for feminists, began by trying to promote the bikini, which was supposed to liberate women from uncomfortably restrictive beachwear.
In 1951, Eric Morley organised The Festival Bikini Contest (which went on to be dubbed Miss World) as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations. When the Swedish winner was crowned in a bikini, countries with religious traditions, especially Roman Catholic ones, threatened to withdraw from the competition. After that, Miss World became a swimsuit-only competition.
Historians point out that, despite our cautious embrace of the bikini in the mid 20th century, the bikini has illustrious forebears. In Sicily, holidaymakers only have to visit the Villa Romana del Casale to see a bevy of bikini-clad athletes cavorting across a series of mosaics dating back to the 4th century.
For female athletes of the times, a bikini bottom resembling a loincloth and a bandeau-style bra were the garments of choice. Elsewhere, Greek urns and paintings from around 1400 BC depict female athletes in similar garments.
But it took a nubile, 18-year-old Brigitte Bardot to put the bikini firmly on the 20th-century map. In 1952, she starred in Manina, The Girl In The Bikini, in which she appeared in scanty two-pieces.
More controversy followed, and the film only got a release in the US six years later because it managed to circumvent the strict cinema code about modesty and decency on screen on the basis that it was “foreign” and therefore American restrictions could not be applied.
A year after that film, Bardot posed in a bikini on numerous beaches during the Cannes Film Festival, after which the bikini photocall became a launch pad for aspiring starlets the world over, including Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg and Diana Dors, who glided down the Grand Canal in a mink version at the 1955 Venice Festival.
What’s most fascinating when you look at these Fifties bikini-clad stars is just how softly voluptuous they were. Untoned, you might even say, in a way that would horrify today’s stars. One snap of Marilyn Monroe even shows her with an obvious roll of fat on her midriff. Quelle horreur!
Compare this to pictures of honed-to-the-bone Pippa Middleton, with her washboard midriff, and you can see how the bikini reveals so much more than a bare belly. If flesh in the Fifties suggested the female as the more malleable, softer sex, today’s role models suggest that modern life involves as much muscle as you can muster, and as little flesh.
The best example of the curvaceous, bikini-clad siren was Ursula Andress in the first Bond movie, Dr No, in 1962. She emerged from the sea like a latter-day Venus, clad in a white, wet, wide-belted bikini complete with a scabbard for holding a knife.
Andress credited the bikini with her subsequent success. The scene has been voted No 1 in the 100 Greatest Sexy Moments of Cinema. If all men lusted after this gorgeous goddess, all women wanted to be Honey Ryder. Sales of bikinis soared, and modesty went to blazes.
But while for lithe actresses and models, wearing a bikini is par for the course, for us mere mortals it can be more nerve-wracking, especially as we age.
On a recent holiday in Spain, I saw not just firm-fleshed teenagers and nubile twenty-somethings sashaying along the sand in their tiny two-pieces, but glam 60 and 70-yearolds in slightly more generous versions, carrying buckets and spades for the grandchildren.
They were not in the least concerned about their roly-poly tums. As Helen Mirren demonstrated so well when she was spotted looking fabulous in a red bikini at the age of 62, boasting a pert bosom and a trim waist, age is no barrier to looking great in a two-piece. – Daily Mail