Whether it's a bikini or a one-piece, the swimsuit has changed the way women dress . This iconic and essential piece of your summer wardrobe—carefree, decidedly feminine, and often subversive—has certainly made waves throughout its history! As we'll see below.
In the beginning... The bikini. Although Louis Réard is often cited as the inventor of the bikini , its origin is actually much further back... In fact, very similar garments were discovered at the Turkish site of Çatal Höyük, a Neolithic city founded around 7000 BC .
Famous mosaics at Villa del Casale in Sicily, dating from 300 AD, depict women wearing miniskirts and a thin band over their breasts . And then what? In the Middle Ages, water was blamed for transmitting diseases, so prolonged bathing was avoided.
The first swimsuits
It wasn't until the 18th century that sea bathing became popular; but it wasn't about revealing any part of the female body. Women bathed in chemises, then in corsets and wide trousers . Then came the Belle Époque bathing suit: a cloak to protect the hair and a long-sleeved dress.
And since being seen in a swimsuit wasn't a good idea, a man named Benjamin Beale came up with the idea of creating mobile bathing cabins . The woman would enter the cabin in her street clothes and change, while the cabin was pulled into the water by oxen or horses. When the aquatic fun was over, a flag was raised to signal that the cabin should return to dry land.
Annette Kellerman and her fine
In 1907, Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman dared to wear a tight-fitting, sleeveless swimsuit that closely resembled the one-piece we know today. Her audacity earned her a fine, and the case made headlines. It must be said that Annette was a young woman with a very strong character.
The reason was that he was born with atrophied leg muscles , so he had to wear braces to walk. At age six, a specialist recommended swimming as a way to stimulate his limbs. Seven years later, thanks to his aquatic training , his legs were almost as strong as those of a normal person.
At 15, she had mastered every stroke and won her first swimming competition . Four years later, she made headlines again by attempting to swim across the English Channel. Swimmers were allowed to compete naked at the time, but Annette was forced to wear a wetsuit . That same year, she swam across Paris, competing against seven men.
To maximize her swimming performance , Annette Kellermann wore a form-fitting swimsuit that left her arms and legs bare. It was this swimsuit that she wore on Boston Beach in 1907, and it was this swimsuit that led to her arrest. The highly publicized incident launched the fashion for one-piece swimsuits and democratized swimming for women.
The battle for the world's smallest swimsuit
In 1932, Parisian fashion designer Jacques Heim designed a two-piece swimsuit , the bottom part of which was a high-waisted short that concealed the navel. Its name: Atome, in reference to the smallest element on the planet. This replaced the knitted wool swimsuit, which weighed 500 grams dry and over three kilos when out of the water.
Hollywood stars popularized it in the 1940s. Unbeknownst to him, Jacques Heim had just dropped a ticking time bomb . And the man responsible for the explosion was Louis Réard, who ran his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, "Les Folies Bergères."
Seeing women roll up their swimsuits to maximize their tan on the beach, Louis Réard conceived the idea of creating a design that would reveal the navel . It would even use less material than the world's smallest swimsuit: a declaration of war against Jacques Heim!
On July 5, 1946, Réard presented his creation at a competition held at the Molitor swimming pool. Four days earlier, the Americans had detonated a bomb in the Marshall Islands, on Bikini Atoll to be exact... see what was coming? Réard wanted to make his mark: his swimsuit would therefore be called "bikini, the first anatomical bomb."
This garment caused such a scandal that Réard couldn't find a model brave enough to wear his creation in the competition. He ended up hiring an exotic dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini. To emphasize how little fabric the new swimsuit had, it was sold in packaging the size of a matchbox .
Although it has its fans, the bikini is met with criticism throughout Europe and the world. It is banned on Spanish, Belgian, and Italian beaches . France is divided: banned on the Atlantic coast, the revealing swimsuit is permitted in the Mediterranean .
The bikini was popularized by the stars
It wasn't until 1953 that the bikini received a boost that would launch its popularity. At 19, Brigitte Bardot accompanied her husband, Roger Vadim, to the Cannes Film Festival and participated in a photo shoot on the Carlton beach. She posed in a white floral bikini , and everyone was talking about it.
In 1956, it was on the big screen that BB scandalized men with a white bikini that became a cult classic in the film "And God Created Woman." A few strokes later, in the first James Bond film, Ursula Andress also emerged from the water in a white bikini. The trend was underway!
Not even Pamela Anderson in her famous red one-piece swimsuit from 'Baywatch' could dethrone the bikini. But the call of retro is never far away, and today, online fashion stores with their one-piece swimsuits are making a strong comeback, as you can see in the Dakonda catalog . Because, regardless of the design, the one-piece swimsuit hasn't quite lost its appeal.
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