Home : Time Off For Play : Recreation, Distractions & Diversions :The BikiniMagazine racks are awash in headlines like “21 Days to the Perfect Bikini Body,” “15 Minutes to Your Best Bikini Shape,” and “How Stars Get Bikini-Ready.” How can one tiny article of clothing (or rather two) have the power to send millions of women into an endorphin-fueled frenzy? The bikini was introduced by a French designer on July 5, 1946. The idea was to liberate women from prudish fashion. Now it has chained them to the gym. No one had to rev up the Stairmaster to look good in a turn-of-the-century bathing costume consisting of eight yards of fabric and weighing 20 pounds wet. In 1913, inspired by the introduction of female athletes into Olympic swimming events, the designer Carl Jantzen made the first truly functional bathing suit, a close-fitting one-piece with shorts on the bottom and short sleeves up top. The first pre-bikini two-pieces, which covered the navel and left only a slender band of midriff exposed, became popular in the 1940s. Pinups of Rita Hayworth and Esther Williams glamorized the pairing of high-waisted bottoms with generous halters.
In 1946 Louis Réard, a former automotive engineer and the son of a lingerie shop owner, joined the hundreds thronging St. Tropez on the French Mediterranean in the euphoria following the end of the Nazi occupation. There he noticed that juenes filles rolled down the waists of their two-pieces and hitched up their tops to catch more sun. This inspired his bikini, a tiny number named after an atoll where the United States had tested the atomic bomb. (The joke—for those who are not French—was that the suit was as small as an atom.) It consisted basically of two triangles of fabric on the top and two more, front and back, on the bottom. He introduced his creation at a fashion event at Piscine Molitor, a popular public pool in Paris. He couldn’t find a model willing to wear such an outfit, so the bikini made its debut on a stripper, Micheline Bernardini. Réard promoted his bathing suit by selling it in a matchbox and declared, “A bikini is not a bikini unless it can be pulled through a wedding ring.” Around the same time Jacques Heim, known for classic sportswear designs, introduced the “Atome,” which he dubbed “the smallest bathing suit in the world.” Both designs lived up to their explosive names with the controversy they garnered. The bikini was banned in both Italy and Spain, where the authorities led tourists wearing it off the beach. The American fashion industry was appalled. As late as 1957 Modern Girl magazine wrote, “It is hardly necessary to waste words on the so-called bikini, since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.” American women still typically wrapped themselves in architectonic swimwear with menacingly conical bras.
But others, particularly French vacationers, were delighted. “Remember that no one had been to the beach in years,” said Jamie Samet, a fashion writer for Le Figaro. “People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life.” The bikini took off as a global phenomenon thanks to Brigitte Bardot. The young French actress wore hers scandalously low on her hips with a barely-there top—when she wore a top at all. With her cascading blonde hair and complete comfort with her body, she became the big screen’s first sex kitten. The success her 1956 film . . . And God Created Woman was not lost on American actresses. Marilyn Monroe tossed her swimming trunks for a pair of white panties and a bandeau top, and others followed. By the early sixties, the bikini had taken hold in America. In 1960 Brian Hyland’s paean to it, “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,” made the top ten. Annette Funicello, who started out as a Mouseketeer, donned a bikini in the movie Beach Party in 1963 and made such a hit that six sequels followed, including How To Stuff A Wild Bikini. The bikini cemented its status as the must-have beach item in America in 1964 when Sports Illustrated published its first swimsuit issue. (A decade or two later, you were born. See a connection?) It featured a model named Babette March giggling in the surf in what was then a sensational bikini but now looks like a demure top and largish panties. (The most recent issue featured a group of topless models in a variety of tiny white bottoms.) The evolution of Réard’s creation has generally been toward the smaller, especially with the emergence of string and thong bikinis. Designers have gotten women revealing evening wear, low-rise jeans, and stomach-exposing T-shirts. to pay more and more for less and less fabric. And the bikini aesthetic has spread intoThe thong fad has thankfully abated in favor of more athletic-looking versions. Actresses kicking butt in movies like Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Blue Crush have made the two-piece, in the words of Gina Bellafonte of The New York Times, “the millennial equivalent of the power suit.” Bikinis are as popular as ever with a generation eager to show off the results of its fitness obsession. One 41-year-old mother of two recently told The New York Times, “I’ve always had tiny string bikinis, and I refuse to give them up.” She hits the gym five times a week. But seriously. “The bikini represents a social leap involving body consciousness, moral concerns, and sexual attitudes,” according to Beth Dincuff Charleston, research associate at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The little two-piece bathing suit, born in 1946, grew up to be part of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Few people of any age or either sex, it seems, really don’t like it today.
Breasts Got Big And Butts Got SmallEverything was bliss in the world of bikini fashion, until breasts got big and butts got small. There are women who work hard to cover their asses—with as little as possible. For years, bikini designers had it licked. Trim women with small breasts—the ideal body back in the day—were perfect models for tiny tops and stringy bottoms. Bikinis got so small they could barely be seen, even with a buck-naked eye. But in the past few years, a new aesthetic has come into fashion: The new perfect body for women is thin, muscular, aerobicized and very big-chested. Sounds grea—for you and me. But this body is also the nightmare of every bikini maker alive. Why? Because even though mankind has built the great pyramids of Egypt, the gothic cathedrals of France and the Golden Gate Bridge, engineers have traditionally done a poor job of creating a bikini that fits and looks good on women with narrow bods and large breasts. As a result, many women with don’t wear bikinis at all, and the planet suffers for it. A woman with the new perfect body has two big problems. First of all, if she’s small on the bottom and large up top, it’s hard to find a bikini made for her body. Until recently, most bikinis were sold as sets, with the top the same size as the bottom. That spells doom for someone with an ample chest on a slender frame. “Finding a bikini that fits my body, top and bottom, has been a nightmare throughout my life,” says Jan, a 34D businesswoman in New York City who, for some inconceivable reason, doesn’t want her last name used. “Guys might think it’s really hot, but the bikinis with smaller bottoms that fit left me spilling over the tops, and the bikinis with tops that worked—well, they were way too big on the bottom.” Second, all too often bikinis that are designed to support the heavy, hanging weight of large breasts end up looking more functional than sexy. Many big-busted women want to wear the skimpy, slender-strapped, girlish bikinis they see on sleek, smaller women. But the wide shoulder straps, extra fabric, underwires and reinforced stitching needed to hold huge breasts make their suits look more appropriate for an old lady than a young woman. “It has been such a struggle to find a suit that doesn’t make me look like my grandmother,” says Mary, a 32D financial analyst from Toronto. “I’m young, and I want to feel cute and sexy.” So she can become a grandmother someday. “You need to find a suit that can hold the weight but doesn’t make you look big and clunky,” says Nancy Brensson Odell, a senior fashion editor at Cosmopolitan. “You don’t want to be falling out, and you don’t want to be sagging down. But there is also an element of architecture, engineering and design, because you want to achieve this look in a fashionable way.” Now, we aren’t talking about implants here. Implants are firm, like big, Styrofoam testicles; they stand up on their own because their bulk is confined in capsules. Implanted breasts are generally so immovable you can cover a nipple with a stamp-size piece of fabric—and nothing’s ever going to pop out and scare the children. Before we get too critical of bikini designers for ignoring the large-breasted, let us recall that they’ve had only a few years to get things right. For a long time, most women scorned the bikini as too risqué. In 1964, Sports Illustrated put its first bikini on the cover of its swimsuit issue. A decade or two later, you were born. See a connection? The ’70s and ’80s were a time when thin bodies and smaller chests were chic, so bikinis got smaller and more flimsy to show off that look. Breasts were not the big show back then. The great bikini innovation of the ’70s was that butt-cracking slip of Lycra fondly known as the thong, which made its way north from Brazil like a skinny, stinky fire ant. Sadly, this tush-centric invention did absolutely nothing for the legions of women victimized by their own megaboobs. They went on being racked by the indignities of trying to find a suit that fit both their breasts and their butts. It was a self-esteem nightmare. That brought on the next big development: selling bikinis as separate tops and bottoms. Believe it or not, this didn’t really take hold until the mid-’90s. “Selling tops and bottoms separately made sense,” explains Brensson Odell, “but it was more expensive. It was cheaper to manufacture, market and sell bikinis as sets.”
No one can say for certain who started the separates trend, but many people credit a New York designer named Malia Mills with being among the first to concentrate on this marketing ploy. Once she had gotten over the philosophical hump of separating tops and bottoms, Mills set about trying to design suits that work for the whole spectrum of women’s body types—including the emerging ideal: big breasts on a boyishly thin body. Mills named one of her designs the D-Mure. The idea was that it was made for the D-cup girl but would show off her assets in a way that made her look sexy. The reaction was instantaneous—and the race to design the perfect bikini for the thin-hipped, big-boobed girl was on. Trends even show that small-breasted women are seeking the new look themselves. According to Gary Abeyta, publisher of the trade magazine Swim Journal, the vast majority of the $800 million in women’s bikinis sold each year in the U.S. are designed to make your average- or smaller-breasted woman look bigger and fuller on top. Meanwhile, many big-boobed women still want to de-emphasize the breast. “Bigger-chested women don’t want to look like they are wearing a huge breast holster,” Mills told me. “The fact is, most of them want to look like their breasts are smaller.” They’re insane, of course. “The grass is always greener,” Abeyta says. “People want what they don’t have.”
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