Did you know the bikini history?

Summer is coming and with it, the days at the beach and the pool, refreshing ourselves due to the high temperatures. Today we ask about a typical garment of the summer period, the bikini, a piece of clothing that had a more than run-over origin. And it is that, as we commented in one of the questions, when the designer, Louis Réard, wanted to show it to the world, he did not find any model who wanted to wear it. Incredible but true! And it is that, although today we cannot imagine a summer without bikinis, there was a time when it was considered an unworthy piece of clothing. This is his story.

Although in the 40s many threw their hands to their heads when they saw women in bikinis, the truth is that this two-piece was already used in ancient times. Proof of this is the mosaic found in the Roman villa del Casale, located in Piazza Armerina in Sicily, dating from the 4th century BC. It shows three women with a top that covers their breasts and a bottom as small underwear, exposing their shoulders, abdomen, and legs. That is a full-fledged bikini. Along with other Greek representations, this mosaic shows that women already wore this outfit, although back then it was designed for physical activity. The arrival of Christianity made this women's kit pass into a better life, remaining stored in a drawer until hundreds of years later.

The first to rebel against female swimsuits that, despite being two-piece, completely covered the woman's anatomy, was the swimmer Annette Kellerman. In the early 20th century, she introduced her own design of hers: a tight-fitting, sleeveless, legless jumpsuit that hugged the body completely and allowed women to move freely in the water. Such was the scandal of this prototype that Kellerman was arrested, but the idea caught on with female groups that began to look for alternatives to the heavy and uncomfortable swimsuits that were used at the time.

At the beginning of the 20th century, wide-cut minidresses were the usual attire for women when they went to the beach, although it was not until the early 1940s when, as a great daring, the shoulders and part of the abdomen began to be seen, but never the navel. It wasn't until 1946 that Louis Réard, a mechanical engineer who had grown up under the influence of his mother's women's lingerie business, came up with a revolutionary idea: a two-piece swimsuit that did show the navel. The morality of the time made the designer see it and want to find a model who wanted to wear the garment to present it to the public.

Women feared the reactions of the environment so, finally, Réard had to hire a dancer from the Casino de Paris (qualified as "exotic" by some sectors) to put it on. It was about Michelle Bernardini who, on July 5, 1946, went down in history for being the first woman to wear a bikini in public in history. As expected, the bikini was too groundbreaking and did not catch on with people until a few years later. In the early 1950s, it was already in common use and became popular thanks to the use given to it by some Hollywood stars such as Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Monroe.

Link to story: https://bikininewsdaily.com/bnd/Didyouknowthebikinihisto-3002