Bikini Story. Patrik Alac

designer Louis Réard sits with two models. Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Louis Réard

      Born in Paris in 1897, Louis Réard began to design beachwear that appealed at once to his wealthy and somewhat worldly clientele in the 1930s. Indeed, his declared goal was to dress “the beautiful, the rich, and the fortunate” in a style appropriate for them to enjoy the sandy shoreline. If the publicity material about his 1950s bathing costumes, which he himself disseminated, is in any way to be believed, he then sprang to worldwide fame from nowhere. But the fact is that in the eyes of the official world of fashion (in which swimsuits were regarded as of fleeting and secondary importance, and they generally still are), Réard’s ascent was hardly noticed, despite the fame and success he undoubtedly achieved. In the august salons de couture in the Avenue Matignon – where members of royal families and the aristocracy themselves paid their respects in order to try on a new hat or a pair of silk gloves – such ideas as his seemed more or less frivolous.

      So when in 1946 his bikini broke all the standard rules of good taste, all the moral norms accepted by clothiers around the globe, it made little difference to the general disdain in which the fashionable crowd already held him. Réard had nonetheless patented his design ahead of the market, and when the name bikini became the recognized general term for a particular style of costume, he acted at once. Every unwarranted use of the name of that style registered under the patent number 19431 – even if it was merely a mention in some newspaper article, such as the one in which the name bikini was applied to a two-piece outfit that came up as high as the navel – was followed by immediate legal action.

      It may well have been this extraordinary effort to protect his “copyright” that took Réard beyond the barrier, as far as the world of high fashion was concerned. It may also have contributed greatly to the curious fact that after 1946 – when the name bikini had become a word of virtually universal familiarity – the name Réard dropped out of sight altogether. There was not a single press review of the sensational line-up at the Molitor Pool on July 5, 1946; not a single article on the life and works of the bikini’s creator. Réard’s final infiltration into the world of fashion was greeted in stony silence – a silence that, if anything, spread to bestow even further obscurity upon him.

      His name is now rarely to be found in the histories of fashion, and when it is, it is simply as “the inventor of the bikini”. The best reference sources give his life-dates (1897–1984) and the probable locations of his birth (Paris or Lille) and death (Lausanne), but nothing else.

      Shortly before his death, a well-known American magazine asked if it might interview “the father of the bikini”. Even Réard himself seemed surprised. In a photo that shows him in a sort of classroom scene together with a tailor’s dummy dressed in a bikini, the old man smiles rather hesitantly at the lens, half-turned to one side and peering over his glasses across the top of one shoulder. Was he, himself, astonished at all the kerfuffle stirred up by his simple little bathing costume? Perhaps he believed he could have received such celebrity fifty years earlier? But other than in this strange smile – the latest and last official record we have of Réard – he has disappeared once and for all.

      Nothing is known any more about the different collections he presented during the 1950s and 1960s which he intended to embody the evolution of the bikini. No details are forthcoming about his life, other than that he continued to reside in the heart of Paris. There are, however, one or two odd pictures scattered among the larger photo agencies, without captions or commentary – silent and fragmentary footnotes to his work.

      And there are a couple of anecdotal stories. The first bikinis were sold in what looked like matchboxes, emphasizing not only how small the costume was but how scandalous it might seem. On the top of these matchboxes was the legend “Maximum 45 centimetres (18 inches) of material” so people knew what they were getting and could not complain about the high price. Obscured by his own creation, Réard disappeared into the shadowy background and into fashion’s mythology.

      Beachwear in 1952: fashion parade in the Janika-Bar, Berlin.

      Beachwear in 1952: fashion parade in the Janika-Bar, Berlin.

      The celebrated Parisian couturier Jacques Heim and his models fly to Vienna to show the women of the city their latest line in clothes, Tailwind (a title suggesting smooth and easy progress forward). The photo shows “the ambassador of fashion” on arrival at the Vienna airport.

      Readers of Vogue had to wait until July 1948 to see the first two-piece costume. Even then, it appeared without accompanying text as an illustration in an advertisement for the latest Helena Rubinstein sun cream. Was it a genuine bikini or a classic number that, by convention, covered the navel? Impossible to tell. The model in the ad had a sash knotted around her waist.

      Other magazines, such as Fémina, simply mentioned Heim, whose more conventional work was already beginning to cause some disquiet: “Are there any items of clothing that stand out particularly? Costumes? Well, this year it is on the beach that women are revealing all. Jacques Heim’s latest creation he calls the Atome – and the name describes its size very aptly. A little too revealing? Indecently so? What can we say? The costume covers everything that should be covered. On the other hand, it shows everything – and how it shows everything! – that can be shown.”

      The most popular women’s magazine of the time was Elle. Its headline on July 9 read “At Cannes, the women are wearing the trousers this year!” In the same issue, the magazine showed some pictures of beach scenes (including, among others, one of a swimmer in an audaciously brief two-piece costume). Elle carefully spoke only of “two-piece costumes” and did not name the bikini as such, but managed, nonetheless, to report on the latest swimwear trends: “Dressed to the nines, women this year are taking to wearing trousers. Less formally dressed, women are wearing virtually nothing at all…”.

      On July 23, the magazine found it necessary to declare a complete turnaround, a radical change in its opinion of swimwear. Accompanying pictures featured only small two-piece costumes, while at the end of the article, the caption under a photo of a one-piece costume read, “The exception: a swimsuit comprising just one element.”

      Three weeks later a knitting pattern for making a one-piece costume was printed under the subheading “For those who do not like two-piece costumes.”

      It was in this way that two-piece bathing costumes, at this rather late stage, but hereafter forever, took on the status of standard beachwear and favourite of swimmers.

      French couturier Jacques Heim’s evening dress for the “Maid of Cotton 1962”, Penne Percy. The long cotton dress is decorated with large flowers printed upon it in colour. It was first featured on June 19, 1962 in Deauville, on the occasion of the International Cotton Convention.

      A Réard bikini, 1949.

Symbols II

      After years of Cold War strategies and of rivalry in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, we might now prefer – especially in light of the less oppressive world perspective at the turn of the millennium – to choose a different symbol of the atomic age that began with Hiroshima. The bikini perhaps, for, in its carefree style and its naturalistic display of corporeal realities, certainly chimes well with what we imagine of the early post-war years and the mentality that prevailed at the time. A girl smiling among palm trees with a bottle of sun lotion in her hand is an image as well entrenched in folklore as any standard postcard. It is in this form that we now perceive what was a blind enthusiasm for the burgeoning atomic age, was equally blind to the potentially cataclysmic effects of releasing such energies. Through the striking metaphor that this era conceived in representing the bomb as a sex symbol, an image of our desire for life (a woman’s body in its divine perfection) blends with the representation of our measureless desire for destruction (an atomic