Bikini Story. Patrik Alac

the other side of the atomic mushroom-cloud which, at the beginning of current history, rose above the paradise of the Southern Seas. It is as if we wanted to swap over our two deepest desires – for life and for death – and were striving to obscure the marked differences that distinguish them, by the passion with which we pursue them (the passion with which we go to war, the passion with which we climb into the bed of a beauty before or after such a war). If we could now bring ourselves to see these as “male-oriented disorders” – as generated by a patriarchal society – we might then find it a reassuring change from a state of things in which woman is for some reason failing to play the role assigned to her with the self-sacrificial devotion that man wants to discern in her. That is the kind of role depicted as an image of her painted on the rounded outer-casing of an atomic bomb or on the hot sands of an island in the Southern Seas.

      A Réard bikini, May 1, 1956.

      A Réard bikini, May 18, 1956.

      Strangely, any scandal that surrounded the bikini never reached the text pages of the magazines. On the contrary, magazines at this time tended to concentrate instead on such problematical questions as “Is my marriage in danger if I go on vacation by myself?” and “Should I take my children on holiday to the seaside?” They likewise gave full instructions on how you could make your costume for a masked ball out of old curtains.

      So, despite everything, there were only one or two scattered insinuations that there might have been a scandal going on somewhere behind closed doors. A French journalist wrote, “This summer you do not just take your clothes off at the seaside – you give a full navel review!” No one seemed to have the courage to come out and confront the theme of nudity. Vogue, as always, thought there would be only one burning question this season: “Should a girl wear a hat or not?”

      But mindsets were changing. And the covers of the weekly magazine Elle showed how much they were changing. On June 25, the headline was “Holiday-time at last!” and the picture was of the buxom torso of a Rita-Hayworth-style blonde in a one-piece blue costume. On each side was an equally blonde young girl in a one-piece costume, representing a daughter. This family, idyll in several ways, took a downhill turn over the following two weeks as it presented women of a more mature age-group who attracted attention only by their unusual hairstyle or headdress (a coronet apparently made of buckles, for instance, or a sun-hat outlined in bright red and black circles).

      The cover of the July 16 issue was distinctly different. It showed a girl in a straw hat wearing transparent overalls and holding a kitten in her arms. The background was rustic, featuring bales of hay, pitchforks, hay-carts, and so forth.

      On July 23, any attempt at a family scenario had vanished. In full colour, the front cover again presented a seductive blonde. This time she was wearing a two-piece costume very similar to a bikini somewhat hidden beneath a Tahitian-style pareo, with a fishing-rod in one hand and a scoop-net in the other. What was visible of the costume – white with red streaks – was highly effective, emphasizing the girl’s very feminine figure and clearly suggesting sexual connotation, heightened by the symbolism of her “fishing”. The scoop-net, in form not unlike a butterfly-net, was evidently meant to represent the nebulous contrast between vulnerable innocence and seductive charm (appropriate to a “fisher of men”).

      A variation on this cover picture, featuring the same girl, appeared in an advertisement for “Your Daily Paper” France Soir. On this occasion, the beautiful damsel laid on the edge of a swimming pool, taking an afternoon siesta. To one side of her, lying there casually, a pair of trainers. Her half-open pareo afforded a glimpse of the bottom of a classic swimsuit covering the navel.

      This was the first time (certainly in France) that a magazine cover deliberately used what was actually a pin-up picture in addressing its usual readers, who were of course mainly housewives, secretaries, and working women. And it represents an eloquent proof of the stunning change – which took place over a matter of a few weeks – in the way women were portrayed. All mocking opposition, any suggestion of public outrage, had evidently faded away altogether.

      It was only toward the end of that year that women’s magazines really discovered the pleasures of summertime. Thereafter, their pages were full of hot-weather recipes and instructions on sunbathing. It was then, too, that advertisements for sun oils and barrier creams as well as slimming products, first made an appearance.

      The new emphasis involving such increased publicity makes it much easier now to trace the further spread of the briefer version of the two-piece bathing costume.

      A line-drawing advertisement in the issue of Elle, dated July 16, drawing the public’s attention to a sun cream which utilized the power of “Uviol”. It claimed to be “the sun cream that guarantees you a tan like a Creole’s,” and showed a beautiful woman largely unclothed – and with navel exposed.

      Later in the summer of 1947, the same magazine contained the first advertisement for natural slimming. “Slim without medication and without regular dieting,” it warbled alluringly, while proposing a course of treatment based on seaweed algae. In the same issue, the writers suggested that women readying to take their summer vacation should “sculpt their bodies for the beach” with the help of special gymnastic exercises. Moreover, users of certain other creams and potions mentioned in related articles are promised “firmness of bosom.” “Do you want a bigger bust? You can have one – if you use our breast-tensioning cream.” Other articles actually detailed dietary regimes for slimming. And still, others gave “prescriptions for sunbathing”, outlining to their evidently inexperienced readers the secrets of sun-tanning: the optimal times of exposure for different types of skin, together with suitable protective measures against the sun’s forceful radiation.

      It was at this time in France that the first publicity material appeared for the bathing sites along the Côte d’Azur. Whole sections of magazines were devoted to it, featuring the coastal locations as unbeatable holiday resorts for people from inland regions of the country. Not to go to visit them would be to turn one’s vacation plans into a waking nightmare.

      Holidays, sunshine, beaches – in their way, these were indications of the progressive spread of brief two-piece bathing costumes. Special care of the legs, the bust, and the skin, protection against the sun, and methods for slimming, all very clearly reflected the evolution of a new cult of the body evidently promoted by the ever greater areas of visible skin. “The legs of a statue and the bosom of Venus” were the height of ambition for many bathers in a bikini, who now had to be concerned with her appearance in a way very different from when she had worn a one-piece garment.

      Bikini from the Réard collection, June 12, 1949.

      Micheline Bernardini in Louis Réard’s original bikini. The photo records the handwritten dedication “To the talented artist M. Réard. A souvenir from Molitor, Micheline Bernardini.”

      But there is another way to track the rise of the two-piece costume’s predominance, apart from via the fashion magazines. Despite the previously mentioned issue of Elle, dated July 30, 1946, which provided a knitting pattern for a one-piece costume “for those who do not like two-piece costumes”, the magazine increased its printing for those interested in two-piece costumes. Throughout 1947, the magazine was chock-full of instructions on how to sew together two-piece costumes for women and swimming trunks “for husband and/or son” in cotton, using 100 grams of lemon yellow cotton fabric.

      Line-drawings and other illustrations from the same year show groups of bathers, among whom all the women are wearing two-piece costumes that leave the navel exposed.

      On June 22, sewing instructions were published for a two-piece costume in red and white using 175 grams of cotton. Two weeks later, in the issue dated July 5, there was a photo of a bather in a genuine Réard bikini. And two weeks later still, there was the first bikini cartoon. A matronly woman in a two-piece, practically non-existent, costume tries to breast-feed a squalling infant, while two young damsels of ethereal