The Bikini at 60
The bikini as we know it turned 60 on July 5. It has weathered scandal, shrugged off the fads and whims of fashion, been celebrated as helping with the emancipation of women and lambasted as turning women into objects of desire. Its wearers have passed into legend, becoming iconic images of 20th century culture.
Who can forget that 1962 Dr No moment when Ursula Andress, as Bond Girl Honeychile Rider, emerges from the sea in a white bikini, knife tucked into a wide belt? So striking was the look that it was repeated 40 years later by Halle Berry in the Bond movie Die Another Day.
In 2001, the Dr No bikini sold at an auction for US$61,500.
Then there was Brigitte Bardot who set pulses racing when she appeared in the bikini in the 1957 film And God Created Woman. Raquel Welch’s animal skin two-piece in One Million Years BC made her an instant pin-up girl.
According to the author of The Bikini Book, former model Kelly Killoren, “The bikini is associated with scandal, that’s why it has survived.” It certainly has. Bardot sparked the French craze at St Tropez, Brian Hyland sung about an Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini in the 1960s and Playboy featured a bikini on its cover in 1962. Two years later, it featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, giving it an acceptable edge. In the 1980s, the bikini suffered a dip in its popularity. Today, however, it is going strong again. Bikini sales in the United States have jumped by 80 per cent in two years.
Here in Jamaica we’ve had our own share of bikini moments. Remember former Miss Jamaica Cathy Levy (1983) who eventually placed fourth in the Miss World competition in her itsy-bitsy bikini and of course April Parchment immortalised forever by Brian Rosen in the 1986 poster ‘Give Me Some Skin’. In recent times, Carla Campbell with that glorious body of hers has placed the bikini back under the fashion radar.
Adapted from The Bikini: Not a brief affair by Kathyrn Westcott
Le bikini, a suit of four triangles made from only 30 inches of fabric, made its debut in Paris in 1946. Unable to find a model who would wear it, the bikini’s creator Louis Reard – a French engineer by profession – enlisted a nude dancer to pose for photographs.
Reard, who was in the mid-1940s running his mother’s lingerie business, had noticed on the beaches of St Tropez women rolling up their bathing suits to try to get a better tan. He and French designer Jacques Heim were in competition to produce the world’s smallest swimsuit.
While Heim’s two-piece was the first to be worn on the beach, it was Reard that gave the bikini its memorable name. Reard reasoned that with the media using words like atomic to describe something sensational then the excitement the bikini would cause would equal that of the bomb.
