Laura Brown takes a light-hearted look at swimming togs past and present

From the Romans to present day, Laura Brown charts the history of swimwear.

ON July 5, 1946, designer Louis Réard’s risqué new swimwear style was unleashed on the movers and shakers of Paris. Four days earlier, an atomic bomb had been dropped on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, and in the hope that his creation might also make headlines across the globe, he named it “le bikini”.

It worked – those “four triangles of nothing,” as one newspaper dubbed the sensational suit, caused quite a stir.

Réard’s bikini was the skimpiest swimwear the world had seen, but it wasn’t the first time a two-piece had been worn. For that, we have to travel all the way back to Roman times.

Grab your towel and join us for a (sometimes rather too brief) history of swimwear.