Happy 66th Bikini! Whether you prefer the itsy-bitsy, or the teeny-weeny, or even the yellow polka dotted bikini; this two-piece swimwear has come a long way over the past 66 years! But did you know that a type of bikini was worn as far back as 1700BC at the palace of Knossos (on Crete)? Bikini-clad girls working out with dumbbells were painted on various drawings showing the importance of spas in the lives of the Greeks. Nonetheless, the modern bikini as we know it only made its debut a little more than six decades ago.
Wikipedia says the modern bikini was introduced by French engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946. Réard was a car engineer but by 1946 he was running his mother's lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergères in Paris. Heim was working on a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer's navel. In May 1946, he advertised the bathing suit, known as the "Atome," as the world's "smallest bathing suit". Réard named his swimsuit the "bikini", taking the name from the Bikini Atoll, one of a series of islands in the South Pacific where testing on the new atomic bomb was occurring that summer. Historians assume Reard termed his swimsuit the "bikini" because he believed its revealing style would create reactions among people similar to those created by America’s atomic bomb in Japan just one summer earlier. Réard sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as "smaller than the smallest swimsuit".[23][24] Réard could not find a model to wear his design. He ended up hiring Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris.[25] That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back of 30 square inches (194 cm2) of cloth with newspaper type printed across, was introduced on July 5 at Piscine Molitor, a public pool in Paris. Heim's design was the first worn on the beach, but clothing was given its name by Réard.
With this in mind, hellasfrappe would like to offer its readers a peak at the fashion trends this season as dictated by the fashion industry's top designers. (Boys... calm down)
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