How the Summer of Atomic Bomb Testing Turned the Bikini Into a Phenomenon

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Nude dancer Micheline Bernardini models the first bikini in Paris, France.<br>Bettmann/CORBIS

The cover of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, featuring a honey-haired model tugging at the bottom of her snake-print string bikini, generated swift reaction. The steamy glimpse of her pelvis prompted howls of outrage—risque, racy, inappropriate, pornographic, declared the magazine's detractors. “It’s shocking, and it’s meant to be,” wrote novelist Jennifer Weiner in the New York Times.

But when French automobile engineer-cum-swimsuit designer Louis Réard launched the first modern bikini in 1946, that seemingly skimpy suit was equally shocking. The Vatican formally decreed the design sinful, and several U.S. states banned its public use. Réard’s take on the two-piece—European sunbathers had worn more ample versions that covered all but a strip of torso since the 1930s—was so flesh-baring that swimsuit models were unwilling to wear it. Instead, he hired nude dancer Micheline Bernardini to debut his creation at a resort-side beauty pageant on July 5, 1946. There, Réard dubbed the “four triangles of nothing” a “Bikini,” named after the Pacific Island atoll that the United States targeted just four days earlier for the well-publicized “Operation Crossroads,”  the nuclear experiments that left several coral islands uninhabitable and produced higher-than-predicted radiation levels.

Réard, who had taken over his mother’s lingerie business in 1940, was competing with fellow French designer Jacques Heim. Three weeks earlier, Heim had named a scaled-down (but still navel-shielding) two-piece ensemble the Atome, and hired a skywriter to declare it “the world’s smallest bathing suit.”

Réard’s innovation was to expose the bellybutton. Purportedly, Réard—who hired his own skywriter to advertise the new bikini as smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit—claimed his version was sure to be as explosive as the U.S. military tests. A bathing suit qualified as a bikini, said Réard, only if it could be pulled through a wedding ring. He packaged the mere thirty squares inches of fabric inside a matchbox. Though Heim’s high-waisted version was embraced immediately and worn on international beaches, Réard’s bikini would be the one to endure.

A bikini designed by the California swim suit company Mabs of Hollywood is held in the Smithsonian collections.

National Museum of American History

Beyond Europe, reception for Réard’s teenie, weenie bikini was as lukewarm as the San Tropez shores that inspired the all but bare-bottomed design. U.S. acceptance of the suit would require not only bikini-clad appearances on the silver screen by Brigitte Bardot, but also by Disney’s wholesome mouseketeer Annette Funicello. A later version of the bellybutton-baring bikini is held in the collections of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. It was designed by Mabs of Hollywood and dates to the 1960s and is quite modest compared to Réard’s initial conception.

World War II rations on fabric set the stage for the bikini’s success. A U.S. Federal law enacted in 1943 required that the same synthetics used for bathing-suit production be reserved for the production of parachutes and other frontline necessities. So the thriftier two-piece suit was deemed patriotic–but of course, the design modestly hid the bellybutton, not unlike the halter-topped “retro” swimsuits famously favored today by pop superstar Taylor Swift. In the meantime, Mabs of Hollywood, the designer of the shiny black Smithsonian suit, gained its reputation making those modest two pieces during World War II, when American fashion mavens were limited to stateside designers.

The "Baker" atomic bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946—the last of three American tests—blasted a water column 5,000 feet into the air.

Corbis

The competition between swimsuit designers in 1946 laced with language related to the new weapons of mass destruction was not just a curious fluke. Historians of the Cold War Era such as the authors of Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb have noted that advertisers capitalized both on the public’s lurid fascination, as well as its fear, of nuclear annihilation.

One of the hot stories of the summer in 1946 was the naming of the first Operation Crossroads bomb after actress Rita Hayworth. All summer, international news reports buzzed with details of the Pacific Island nuclear tests designed to study the effects of atomic weapons on warships, and the homage to the leggy star was no exception.

Orson Welles Announces the Rita Hayworth Atomic Bomb

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Actor Orson Welles, who happened to be married to Hayworth at the time, broadcast a radio show on the eve of the first bomb’s release near the Bikini Atoll. He added a “footnote on...