The world's first... Atome

Model Micheline Bernardini wearing the first bikini in 1946.

I encountered a website today in which the blogger was assembling everything about his/her birth year. So I searched my birth year in Google and Flickr, and stumbled upon the photo above. The bikini was invented in 1946:

The bikini was invented and launched almost simultaneously by two French fashion designers: Jacques Heim and Louis Reard. Heim was a swimsuit designer who had created a two-piece suit to be sold in his beach shop in Cannes. He marketed the swimsuit as the “Atome,” (named for its small size and meant to be compared with the atom, the smallest particle of matter yet known). To market his new innovation, Heim hired skywriters to advertise his new, scandalously tiny swimsuit.

The same summer of 1946 in which Heim was introducing his “Atome,” Louis Reard was creating his own similar, two-piece swimsuit. He named and marketed his swimsuit as the bikini, proclaiming that it was “smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world.” Reard christened his swimsuit the bikini in honor of post-WWII, experimental atomic bombs being detonated in the South Pacific, near the Bikini Reef. The bikini swimsuit was supposed to have caused the same earth-shattering reaction among those who viewed it as was inspired by the rising mushroom clouds of atomic bombs. The bikini soon superseded the “Atome” as the official appellation of the two-piece swimsuit.

The bikini received its first official induction into swimwear fashion on July 5, 1946 when French model Micheline Bernardini paraded onto the runway in it at a poolside fashion show in Paris. A number of American correspondents responsible for reporting the fashion show were both shocked and titillated by the model’s skimpy attire. While many Americans believed the bikini was simply too scandalous for virtuous American women to adopt, the bikini would make its debut into American fashion only one year later.