In the 1940s, two men, Louis Réard and Jacques Heim, began competing to create something for which men around the world have not thanked them nearly enough. No endeavour has more exemplified the testosterone drive, than two men competing to create the smallest swimsuit in the world. These men should be lauded to the same degree as Hugh Heffner or Lary Flynt, but instead they are relegated to the second page of Google searches and hidden behind the veil of what they invented. This injustice must be redressed......
Jacques Heim created what he labelled as, the world's “smallest bathing suit” in 1946. It was, by today's standards, relatively nun-like, the bottom half being large enough to cover the navel.
Not wanting to be outdone, Louis Réard, an engineer, created his own version of this bathing suit, which he described - using sky-writers over the French Riviera no less - as “smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world”.
A fierce marketing battle ensued that would see nude dancers being used as models and “road yachts” being specifically created as marketing platforms.
We move now to halfway around the world, to an atoll called the Bikini Atoll, which makes up part of the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Draw a line from Australia to Hawaii and somewhere in the middle of that, you will hit these islands. The remoteness of this location was not an accident.
After the second world war, the US government decided that since they had made the biggest bombs the world had ever seen and dropped them on Japan, they needed somewhere where they could test even bigger ones. When choosing a place to test the largest vector of destruction ever conceived, one might perhaps consider deserts, uninhabited wastelands or ice locked tundras. In this instance, however, a populated tropical paradise was chosen. Of course. Why didn't I think of that?
The 167 inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll were relocated to another island in the archipelago after being sold the line that their home was needed for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”. Classy.
On the 1 July 1946 the first of these tests took place in the Bikini Atoll. A bomb named Gilda was dropped and detonated above the atoll. How Rita Hayworth felt about the name of her character and (arguably) most famous movie being used for the name of a weapon of mass destruction remains a largely undocumented fact.
The US government, in what would be the precursor to the “my bomb is bigger than yours” mentality of the Cold War, made great fanfare of this test. An invited audience and large press core was there to view the blast and as a result nearly all of the world papers carried the story.
Now let's swing back around the world. Louis Réard is still looking for an edge to truly trump his bathing suit over that of Jacques Heim. The Réard bathing suit would be released on the 5 July 1946. Réard then had a brilliant idea and, riding the coat tails of the atomic bomb test, decided to name his bathing suit a “bikini” in deference to the nuclear tests carried out four days prior.
And so, a piece of clothing that brings men such happiness on any given beach day, was named for the first of many - 67 in total - nuclear tests carried out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Incidentally, the name Bikini comes from the original Marshallese name for the island, Pikinni which means “surface of coconuts” (obviously). So the next time you're at the beach, compliment the first bikini clad lady you see on the surface of her coconuts.....and try not to get slapped.