{Click on Any Image to View It Full Size in a New Window}

The bikini was invented and introduced on July 5, 1946 … a date we commemorate annually as Bikini Day … but this year it’s the skimpy swimsuit’s Seventieth Anniversary!

Yet while the traditional gift for a 70th is platinum … the suit’s origin was actually plutonium! “It is named after the Bikini Atoll, site of the 1946 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands,” notes one historical blog, “on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would generate would be like the atomic bomb.”

This anatomic bombshell dates as far back as the Third Century—as depicted on a mosaic found in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily—thought to have been owned by Roman Emperor Maximilian—which is called Coronation of the Winner.

“Two women athletes are shown, with one being crowned,” reads the official description. “They wear brownish two-piece costumes—a sash of cloth covers the breasts, and another is wrapped across the hips and between the legs.” The floor tiles further depict “young women participating in weightlifting, discus throwing and running games dressed in bandeau-like garments.

The ten maidens featured “have been anachronistically dubbed The Bikini Girls.”

Not much happened in the way of swimwear—most either took off their clothes or bathed in their underwear—until the late 19th Century, after the Industrial Revolution had created wealthy women with leisure time to spend at the beach. This photo, dating to 1888, shows one lady changed in a cabana while another prepares to don her swimsuit behind a modesty blanket—while suffering a wardrobe malfunction shocking for its day!

A dozen years later, this cheeky quintet welcomed in the 20th Century on the beach at Coney Island.

Within a decade, the first form-fitting outfit was worn by Australian swimming champ Annette Kellerman, later immortalized on film by Esther Williams in 1952’s Million Dollar Mermaid. Kellerman was arrested on Boston’s Revere Beach in 1907 “for wearing form-fitting sleeveless one-piece knitted swimming tights that covered her from neck to toe.” But which also allowed her lush dark pubic hair to show through!

The notoriety from her arrest led to the first modern swimwear line, and an acting career—starring in the first million dollar movie ever, 1916’s Daughter of the Gods, in which she wore this daring bikini-like creation (above right).

Following the end of World War I, health and wellness became all the rage…and in the 1920s and ’30s, people began to shift from ‘taking in the waters’ (at bathhouses and spas) to ‘taking in the sun’ at beaches. With the invention of latex and nylon, swimsuits became more elastic and self-supporting, allowing for increasing degrees of midriff exposure—though never the navel—as America entered the 1940s.

Then, requiring vast amounts of cotton, silk, nylon and wool for the War effort, the government issued Regulation L-85 in 1942, drastically cutting the use of natural fibers in clothing and mandating “a 10% reduction in the amount of fabric in women’s beachwear.” To comply, swimsuit manufacturers removed skirt panels, while increasing production of the two-piece swimsuit with bare midriffs, to save cloth.

Ever patriotic, Hollywood answered the call with starlet Dona Drake taking aim at the enemy (below left) and lovely Linda Christian taking off her top, albeit from behind (below right).

Against this back drop {see what I did there?}, even demure Olivia de Havilland—then not yet 30—took up the cause by baring her bod above the belly button in 1945.

Ageless Olivia just turned 100 this July 1st.

Which is the date on which the United States detonated the most destructive device yet known to man.

“On July 1, 1946 at 9 o’clock in the morning,” reads one account, “an atomic bomb exploded with a force of 23,000 tons above Bikini, a coral atoll in the South Pacific, hitherto unheard of.” Perhaps only through exotic images in National Geographic showing that its isolated island inhabitants did not wear tops.

“On July 3, readers in Paris learned that another sort of bomb had gone off,” recounts The Bikini Book. American film star Rita Hayworth, in her latest film, was “emanating the torrid heat of an atomic explosion.” Miss Hayworth was described as “the most perfectly powerful weapon of war since Creation” in her one-piece swimsuit (below left). When lovely Rita went with a two piece (below right), the term “bombshell” was coined.

No wonder she adorned the nose of more WW II fighter planes than any other actress …

… and, astonishingly, Hayworth’s image was affixed to the bomb detonated over Bikini Atoll on 7-1-46, just two days before the article likening her to “an atomic explosion”!

That’s her pictured on the payload of the so-called Able bomb, and the sheet music from which the picture was taken. “The first test was Able {military jargon for starting with the letter ‘A’},” according to Wikipedia. “The bomb, named Gilda after Rita Hayworth’s character in the 1946 eponymous film, was dropped from a B-29 Superfortress plane.”

Inspired by the August 1945 bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the War, famous French fashion designer Jacques Heim (below left) had designed a two-piece swimsuit for the Cannes Film Festival the following May that he dubbed the “Atome”—since it was the smallest particle of matter yet discovered.

“Unusual as it was,” observes The Bikini Book, “it still covered the navel (the modesty boundary of the 1940s) and thus required a lot more cloth to manufacture.” Into the breach stepped an automobile engineer named Louis Réard, who “undercut the Atome in its brevity by slicing the top off of Heim’s bottoms.”

After splitting the Atome {ahem}, Réard fits his first model for the daring design (above left) in June 1946…then poses with his creation a year before his death at age 87 in 1984.

“The initial presentation of the costume was planned with meticulous foresight,” explains one expert. “The mid-day edition of France Soir newspaper on July 5th accordingly invited the public to attend the Molitor Pool that very afternoon, where the title of ‘The Most Beautiful Girl Swimmer’ would be competed for by gorgeous models under the eyes of a select panel of judges. The prize was to be the Réard Cup”—as specified in the actual announcement (below left) and the next day’s article on the event (below right).

According to an eyewitness account: “Then came July 5. It was a day on which there was genuinely ‘torrid heat,’ for the temperature was 35°C (96°F) in the shade. Everything conspired to inscribe Réard’s creation on the collective conscious once and for all—tremendous heat imaginably as an echo of the atomic explosion four days before, exotic sands, and the seductive silhouette of a native girl with long legs, bronzing her skin between the sun and the sea. The legend of the Bikini is born.”

As the models paraded their wares in typical swimwear of the day (above) and “even before the contest judges’ final verdict, a number of spectators around the edge of the pool had been remarking on how one of the girls (who had been particularly careful to remain facing the audience) had extraordinarily little on,” the observer continued. “When this girl was then summoned up to the podium as one of the finalists selected by the jury, a murmur of appreciation ran like lightning through the assembly.”

At first Réard had tried to persuade his usual fashion models to wear the secret swimsuit, but “all refused point blank.” At the last minute he enlisted an 18-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini (below left)—figuring “she would certainly feel dressed, even in the skimpiest outfit” (below right).

“Like her companions, she had on a two-piece swimsuit,” the eyewitness account picks up, “but hers was of such diminutive dimensions that she seemed more naked than clothed. Her breasts were modestly concealed behind two triangles of cloth held up by a halter strap tied around the neck. The base of the costume was also cut in the shape of a triangle, leaving most of the hips and all of the thighs entirely bare. To those present at the Molitor Pool on this hot summer afternoon, it was the height of shamelessness and close to obscene.”

What went unnoticed by the shocked spectators and press—but not by Sleuth—is that the impromptu assignment hadn’t allowed the hirsute dancer to shave {bottoms were covered at the Casino de Paris}…so her lush pubes peeked out of the tiny triangle!

Calling his creation the Bikini after the blast 4 days earlier, Réard insisted that the bathing costume was “even smaller than the smallest swimsuit in the world” {in reference to Heim’s Atome claim}. Having a total area of just 30 square inches of cloth, it supposedly fit in the tiny matchbox that Bernardini held in her hand.

“That first bikini has an astonishing impact in terms of the material,” reflects one historian. ‘What seemed from a distance to be cloth bottoms with a pattern on them—flowers perhaps—turned out on closer inspection to be a collage of newspaper cuttings and headlines about the nuclear test” at Bikini Atoll.

“The bikini, thus, took every advantage of the media uproar it was bound to provoke.”

Back to that eyewitness: “The roguishly profane Micheline Bernardini in her sensational two-piece swimsuit winked at the photographers as their cameras flashed incontinently. The beautiful blonde gave an interview…

…then paraded once more in front of the astonished throng, hesitating as it was between applause and loud indignation, and then coquettishly made her exit—but not without one last smile as she entered the changing room.”

And it was that parting shot that really shocked the spectators. The models who’d refused to wear it were “scandalized in particular by the back of the bikini bottom, which left almost all the buttocks uncovered!” {which clearly had always been covered before}.

“From behind,” writes Bikini Science, “the suit is, well, bare-butted.” Only a nude dancer would think of wearing it.” Indeed it’s positively In Seine!

The only existing footage of that world-altering afternoon 70 years ago today can be found here, from a 2011 Sundance Channel documentary:

Meanwhile, an unrepentant Réard insisted that to be a “genuine” bikini, the fabric must be small enough to fit through a wedding band …

And don’t forget to tie the knot!

In essence the auto engineer had taken rival Jacques Heim’s Atome suit (above left) and cut two triangles in the top and sliced off the sides of the bottom (above right).

Ever clever, Réard quickly patented his bold Bikini design—less than two weeks after it was first exhibited.

And the woman on whom it was exhibited became a sudden star—the International Herald Tribune alone ran nine stories on the event—with Micheline receiving “over 50,000 fan letters”—most asking for an autograph.

To avoid ardent admirers and the press, Bernardini soon retreated to Australia—home to the then still-active first siren of the swimsuit, Annette Kellerman—and resumed work at Sydney’s Tivoli Theatre as a topless dancer {rare Sleuth find, with her name on it, below}.

Micheline was “reported in the local newspapers as performing at wild student parties” around Sydney…and eventually married an American solider stationed there and moved to the United States, where she “worked as an actress until 1970. She was never seen or heard from again.”

Except for this rare and remarkable recreation of her landmark leggy repose, on the Bikini’s 65th anniversary. She was 83 years old … and will turn 89 in December.