A bikini is a women's two-piece swimsuit that features one piece on top that covers the breasts, and a second piece on the bottom: the front covering the pelvis but usually exposing the navel, and the back covering the intergluteal cleft and often the buttocks.[2][3] The size of the top and bottom can vary, from bikinis that offer full coverage of the breasts, pelvis, and buttocks, to more revealing designs with a thong or G-string bottom that covers only the mons pubis, but exposes the buttocks, and a top that covers only the areolae.
In May 1946, Parisian fashion designer Jacques Heim released a two-piece swimsuit design that he named the Atome ('Atom') and advertised as "the smallest swimsuit in the world".[4] Like swimsuits of the era, it covered the wearer's belly button, and it failed to attract much attention. Clothing designer Louis Réard introduced his new, smaller design in July.[5] He named the swimsuit after the Bikini Atoll, where the first public test of a nuclear bomb had taken place four days before. His skimpy design was risqué, exposing the wearer's navel and much of her buttocks. No runway model would wear it, so he hired a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini to model it at a review of swimsuit fashions.[6]
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Due to its revealing design, the bikini was once considered controversial, facing opposition from a number of groups and being accepted only very slowly by the general public. In many countries, the design was banned from beaches and other public places: in 1949, France banned the bikini from being worn on its coastlines; Germany banned the bikini from public swimming pools until the 1970s, and some communist groups condemned the bikini as a "capitalist decadence".[7] The bikini also faced criticism from some feminists, who reviled it as a garment designed to suit men's tastes, and not those of women.[citation needed] Despite this backlash, however, the bikini still sold well throughout the early to later 20th century, albeit discreetly.[clarification needed]
The bikini gained increased exposure and acceptance as film stars like Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welch, and Ursula Andress wore them and were photographed on public beaches and seen in film.[7] The minimalist bikini design became common in most Western countries by the mid-1960s as both swimwear and underwear. By the late 20th century, it was widely used as sportswear in beach volleyball and bodybuilding. There are a number of modern stylistic variations of the design used for marketing purposes and as industry classifications, including monokini, microkini, tankini, trikini, pubikini, skirtini, thong, and g-string. A man's single piece brief swimsuit may also be called a bikini.[3] Similarly, a variety of men's and women's underwear types are described as bikini underwear. The bikini has gradually gained wide acceptance in Western society. By the early 2000s, bikinis had become a US$811 million business annually, and boosted spin off services such as bikini waxing and sun tanning.[8]
While the two-piece swimsuit as a design existed in classical antiquity,[9] the modern design first attracted public notice in Paris on July 5, 1946.[10] French automotive engineer Louis Réard introduced a design he named the "bikini", adopting the name from the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean,[11][12] which was the colonial name the Germans gave to the atoll, transliterated from the Marshallese name for the island, Pikinni.[13] Four days earlier, the United States had initiated its first peacetime nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads.[14] Réard hoped his swimsuit's revealing style would create an "explosive commercial and cultural reaction" similar to the explosion at Bikini Atoll.[15][16][17][18]
Variations of the term are used to describe stylistic variations for promotional purposes and industry classifications, including monokini, microkini, tankini, trikini, pubikini, bandeaukini and skirtini. A man's brief swimsuit may also be referred to as a bikini.[3] Similarly, a variety of men's and women's underwear types are described as bikini underwear.
Archaeologist James Mellaart described the earliest bikini-like costume in Çatalhöyük, Anatolia in the Chalcolithic era (around 5600 BC), where a mother goddess is depicted astride two leopards wearing a costume somewhat like a bikini.[9][27] The two-piece swimsuit can be traced back to the Greco-Roman world, where bikini-like garments worn by women athletes are depicted on urns and paintings dating back to 1400 BC.[28]
Soon after, Louis Réard created a competing two-piece swimsuit design, which he called the bikini.[57] He noticed that women at the beach rolled up the edges of their swimsuit bottoms and tops to improve their tan.[5] On 5 July, Réard introduced his design at a swimsuit review held at a popular Paris public pool, Piscine Molitor, four days after the first test of an US nuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll. The newspapers were full of news about it and Réard hoped for the same with his design.[6][58] Réard's bikini undercut Heim's atome in its brevity. His design consisted of two side-by-side triangles of fabric forming a bra, and two front-and-back triangular pieces of fabric covering the mons pubis and the buttocks, respectively, connected by string. When he was unable to find a fashion model willing to showcase his revealing design,[59] Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, an 18-year old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris.[60] He announced that his swimsuit, was "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit".[61][62] Réard said that "like the [atom] bomb, the bikini is small and devastating".[63] Fashion writer Diana Vreeland described the bikini as the "atom bomb of fashion".[63] Bernardini received 50,000 fan letters, many of them from men.[11][39]
Photographs of Bernardini and articles about the event were widely carried by the press. The International Herald Tribune alone ran nine stories on the event.[64] French newspaper Le Figaro wrote, "People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life."[39]
Heim's atome was more in keeping with the sense of propriety of the 1940s, but Réard's design won the public's attention.[50] Although Heim's design was the first worn on the beach and initially sold more swimsuits, it was Réard's description of the two-piece swimsuit as a bikini that stuck.[10][65] As competing designs emerged, he declared in advertisements that a swimsuit could not be a genuine bikini "unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring."[11] Modern bikinis were first made of cotton and jersey.[66]
Despite the garment's initial success in France, women worldwide continued to wear traditional one-piece swimsuits. When his sales stalled, Réard went back to designing and selling orthodox knickers.[68] In 1950, American swimsuit mogul Fred Cole,[39] owner of mass market swimwear firm Cole of California, told Time that he had "little but scorn for France's famed Bikinis."[69] Réard himself would later describe it as a "two-piece bathing suit which reveals everything about a girl except for her mother's maiden name."[70] Fashion magazine Modern Girl Magazine in 1957 stated that "it is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing".[10][39]
In 1951, Eric Morley organized the Festival Bikini Contest, a beauty contest and swimwear advertising opportunity at that year's Festival of Britain. The press, welcoming the spectacle, referred to it as Miss World,[71][72] a name Morley registered as a trademark.[73] The winner was Kiki Håkansson of Sweden, who was crowned in a bikini. After the crowning, Håkansson was condemned by Pope Pius XII,[7][74][75] while Spain and Ireland threatened to withdraw from the pageant.[76] In 1952, bikinis were banned from the pageant and replaced by evening gowns.[77][78] As a result of the controversy, the bikini was explicitly banned from many other beauty pageants worldwide.[79][80] Although some regarded the bikini and beauty contests as bringing freedom to women, they were opposed by some feminists[7][81] as well as religious and cultural groups who objected to the degree of exposure of the female body.
Paula Stafford was an Australian fashion designer credited with introducing the bikini to Australia;[82][83] in a famous incident in 1952, model Ann Ferguson was asked to leave a beach in Surfers Paradise because her Paula Stafford bikini was too revealing.[84][85] The bikini was banned in Australia, on the French Atlantic coastline, in Spain, in Italy,[7] and in Portugal, and was prohibited or discouraged in a number of US states.[86][87] The United States Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, enforced from 1934, allowed two-piece gowns but prohibited the display of navels in Hollywood films.[88] The National Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic body overseeing American media content, also pressured Hollywood and foreign film producers to keep bikinis from being featured in Hollywood movies.[89] As late as 1959 one of the United States' largest swimsuit designers, Anne Cole of the Anne Cole brand,[90][91] said, "It's nothing more than a G-string. It's at the razor's edge of decency."[92] The Hays Code was abandoned by the mid-1960s, and with it the prohibition of female navel exposure, as well as other restrictions.[93] The influence of the National Legion of Decency also waned by the 1960s.[94]
In Europe, 17-year-old Brigitte Bardot wore scanty bikinis (by contemporary standards) in the French film Manina, la fille sans voiles ("Manina, the girl unveiled"). The promotion for the film, released in France in March 1953, drew more attention to Bardot's bikinis than to the film itself. By the time the film was released in the United States in 1958, it was re-titled Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. Bardot was also photographed wearing a bikini on the beach during the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. Working with her husband and agent Roger Vadim, she garnered significant attention with photographs of her wearing a bikini on every beach in the south of France.[99] 2ff7e9595c
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