3 August 2022 - THE DAY THE BIKINI ARRIVED

 

THE DAY THE 

BIKINI ARRIVED

G'day folks,

Millions of men would come to be grateful that Frenchman Louis Réard, a car mechanic, had an unlikely sideline in the 1940s – he also looked after his mother’s lingerie boutique in Paris. And from there he created the bikini, which was unveiled in 1946.

Up to that point, the most revealing bathing costume on the market displayed a mere sliver of flesh at the midriff. A scornful Réard thought women should be more daring, especially with a spirit of “doing your own thing” taking hold across Europe after the chains of war had finally been broken and people were beginning to enjoy a new taste of freedom.

Adding to the pressure for change was the drive by clothing manufacturers and designers to produce new ranges that would reflect the free-spirited mood of the times.

Rising to the challenge, Réard created a bathing costume using no more than 30 inches of fabric, the bottom half made basically from two triangles of cloth held together with string and the top half no more than a skimpy bra.

He thought the design would be “highly explosive” and, inspired by American atomic bomb tests that had started to take place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, he cheekily called his swimwear “the bikini”.

Now he needed to market it. But finding a model prepared to appear in public wearing his scandalously skimpy creation proved to be quite a challenge. Finally, he recruited 19-year-old exotic dancer Micheline Bernardini who had no qualms at all about parading semi-naked for all to see.

Expecting big headlines after the launch at a Paris swimming pool, Réard designed a bikini for Micheline printed appropriately, as he thought, with newspaper type.

Another French designer, Jacques Heim, had produced a competing swimsuit which he called the “atom” and described it as “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” But Réard’s creation was considerably smaller and he advertised it as “smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit.”

Shockingly for many people, it was also the first time that the wearer’s navel had been exposed.

There was a lot of initial resistance to the bikini; indeed it was banned on beaches in Spain and Italy for a time and was considered unacceptable in the United States. But more and more women wanted one and they appeared in increasing numbers on Europe’s beaches as each summer passed.

A significant breakthrough come in 1958 when Brigitte Bardot, the so-called “sex kitten” of the age, exploded onto cinema screens flaunting a bikini in her iconic film, And God Created Woman.

In the US, barriers were broken in 1960 when pop star Bryan Hyland scored a major worldwide hit with a novelty number which told of his girl dressed only in an “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Louis Réard, who insisted that a two-piece wasn’t a genuine bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring,” continued selling them from his shop in Paris until 1980. He died in 1984 at the age of 88.

3 September 2018 - THE FIRST MONIKINI

THE FIRST MONIKINI

G'day folks,

Amazing how fashions change. 

When we think of the monokini today, we picture those fiddly one-piece swimsuits that give you awkward tan lines, popularised by the Kardashian and Hilton sisters. But the first monokini was in fact originally a topless swimsuit that exposed the female breasts, conceived in 1964 by avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, who predicted (rather accurately) that “bosom will be uncovered within five years.”

While the design initially had a harder time catching on in the United States (the first American model to pose in the swimsuit, Peggy Moffitt, received death threats), the monokini appears to have found itself more at home unsurprisingly in Paris, at the legendary Piscine Molitor, where the first bikini was revealed to the world nearly twenty years earlier in 1946.

 The suit’s creator, Rudi Gernreich, was an Austrian-born American fashion designer and early gay activist who had learned about female fashion in his aunt’s dress shop in Vienna. Rudi and his mother fled Austria after its annexation to Nazi Germany, where Hitler had banned nudity, among many other acts. Austrian citizens were advocates of exercising nude, a rejection of the over-civilized world. Gernreich was very much against sexualization of the human body and the notion that the body was essentially shameful, which was reflected prominently in his designs.

Widely censored in the media and renounced from all corners including Vatican officials and the U.S Republicans, who tried to blame the suit on the Democrats’ stance on moral issues. Even the Soviet Union chimed in, calling it barbarianism. Never intended by the designer to be a commercial success, over 3000 monokinis at $24 were sold in New York in the summer of 1964 at leading store like Henri Bendel. The monokini greatly influenced the sexual revolution by emphasizing a woman’s personal freedom of dress, even when her attire was provocative and exposed more skin than had been the norm during the more conservative 1950s.

The Peggy Moffitt photograph became a celebrated image of the extremism of 1960s designs and raised the feminist issue of whether both genders should be allowed equal exposure above the waist. In its December 1962 issue, Sports Illustrated declared that Rudi Gernreich had “turned the dancer’s leotard into a swimsuit that frees the body. In the process, he has ripped out the boning and wiring that made American swimsuits seagoing corsets.”

 It had all started the year prior in 1963 when the editor of Look magazine, Susanne Kirtland had asked Gernreich to make the suit to accompany a trend story along futuristic lines. When a photo shoot for his topless swimsuit was arranged on Montego Bay in the Bahamas, all five models for the session outright refused to wear the design. The photographer finally persuaded a local prostitute to model it. Only the back view of the monokini ended up being published in Look in 1964, but it was Kirtland who pursuaded Gernreich to produce the design commercially and make it available to the public.

In June of 1964, the PR manager of the Condor Nightclub in San Francisco gave one of the waitresses the monokini designed by Gernreich to wear for her act. At that moment, Carol Doda, a former prune picker became the first modern topless dancer in the United States. Within a few days, women in clubs all the Broadway St. clubs of San Francisco were sporting the monokini in many of the clubs lining San Francisco’s Broadway St, effectively reinventing the burlesque era of the early 20th century and ushering in the era of the topless bar.

Carol Doda was later arrested in 1965 for indecency which sparked a protest outside the police department calling for her release. The monokini had made the former prune picker a symbol of sexual freedom.

 In the same year he released the monokini, Rudy also invented what we essentially know today as a seamless soft-cup elastic bra. The “No-Bra”, as he named it, was made of sheer-stretch fabric without underwires or lining of any kind. In 1972, he then designed the “No-Bra Bra”, which was made of sheer, stretchy fabric that could be pulled on over the head. His minimalist designed revolutionized bra design, changing the trend from a sculpted, bullet-shaped bosom to a more natural shape. (Thanks for that Rudy!)

Clancy's comment: Some photographers have tough assignments, eh? Oh, did you happen to notice the cameras they were using?

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