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Originally Posted by widebody911

That's quite something.

First "bikini", 1946.

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,”

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.

Read more: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian