The French designer Louis Réard presented a spectacular fashionable novelty 75 years ago: the bikini. Since then, the four triangles have made a career around the world
Dear bikini! Naming you as the smallest item of women’s clothing in the world in terms of area, of all places, after a place in the Pacific where the Americans’ first nuclear weapons tests took place in 1946 shows a more than special sense of good taste. Did you know that the indigenous people of Bikini were forcibly resettled, that the atoll is still radioactively contaminated with a total of 23 hydrogen bombs and it can be doubted that any compensation has been paid for this so far? But you and your few square centimeters of material can hardly be blamed for that.
Actually, you are well older than 75 years. Even in antiquity, women from the world wore bikinis in sporting competitions. And in the 1930s, when you still consisted of a kind of tennis skirt and bra, you were called the “Palm Beach Combination”. But the German Bathing Police Ordinance of 1932 made it unmistakably clear with the so-called gusset decree what chaste body covering should look like: “Women are only allowed to bathe in public if they are wearing a bathing suit that completely covers the chest and body on the front of the upper body and is tight under the arms as well as with trimmed legs and a gusset. “
For many, the bikini was just sheer sexism
It was not until 1946 that you became frivolous, and the designer Louis Réard, so electrified by the reports on the atomic tests, gave you your famous name. And applied with the following slogan: “Le Bikini, la première bombe an-atomique”. The first anatomical bomb. Pun. Understand
With the abolition of any minimum concealment convention, you got it from all sides: for some, sexism in its purest form, capitalist decadence for others. And until the 1970s you didn’t even have to show up with you in German swimming pools.
What not to do: Ass lifting and waxing the bikini line
If you google bikini, you are right at the gates of self-optimization hell: diets for the bikini figure, ass lifting and cellulite-away offers, waxing for the bikini line, bikini tan. To this day you are both a scourge and liberation, and you are available in all forms of administration: from crocheted (was always a crazy idea) to studded with diamonds and recycled from plastic bottles, everything is included. From the cheek cord to the burkini, devised by high-fashion designers or off the peg. Fortunately, you’ve long since changed from dictator to democrat, and it doesn’t matter nowadays whether your wearer is doing sit-ups months before bikini season or prefers to swing the pounds freely. We say: Congratulations, old skin!
