SKIRMISHER

Nowadays, we take bikinis for granted; we’re even choking on it, just take a look at any hip-hop music video. Not that I’m complaining. But there was a time bikinis were taboo. All right, let me rephrase it: there was a time bikinis or things like them were, first, okay to wear (as proved by this circa 300 AD mosaic of exercising Roman women wearing bikinis), then they became taboo during boring times like the Victorian Era, and then they became fashionable again.

The modern bikini was invented by French engineer Louis Reard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946, in about the same month the Americans were doing the first round of nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll on Marshall Islands. They called it “bikini” because the exciting apparel was supposedly as explosive as the atomic bombs being tested on the poor atoll.

But the bikini’s journey hasn’t stopped, yet. Slate presents an enlightening piece on the bikini’s evolution, as it says:

Sixty years ago this week, the world’s first bikini made its debut at a poolside fashion show in Paris. The swimsuit is now so ubiquitous—and, when compared with, say, the sight of Britney’s pregnant, naked haunches on the cover of Bazaar, so demure—it’s hard to comprehend how shocking people once found it.

The bikini continues to arouse the interest and imagination of both women and men everywhere. But I’d still prefer having the role of somebody slipping them off some nice, willing, understanding girl.

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