Originally BLOG # 1 – 20 Jan 2020 from davescoldwarcanada.com.

Garments similar to the bikini have been worn for ages. Paintings from ancient Italy prove that women were wearing revealing two-piece outfits at least four thousand years ago. But the modern bikini was born in 1946, and was called the ‘bikini” for a specific reason.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In July 1946, the U.S. government announced that they would soon be testing an atom bomb at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific. This was the first time the U.S. government announced the testing of an atom bomb, and people around the world were worried about the military ex­ploding the most power­ful bomb in history,

 

 

 

 

 

 

End-of-the-world fears were running high. Only the ‘any-excuse-for-a ­party” French took the whole thing in stride: They held “Bikini” par­ties, determined that if the world was about to be blown up, they were going to go out – quite literally – having a blast.

At the same time, Paris was hosting a fash­ion show that was scheduled to take place four days after the explosion. Designer Louis Reard had already planned on introducing something explosive himself- He was putting model Micheline Bernardini in a skimpy, two­ piece bathing suit. He decided that if he called it a “bikini,” he’d attract even more attention.

 

 

 

 

 

The organizers loved it. They figured that if the world ended, no one would be around to complain about how much skin the model had revealed, and if the world didn’t end, they might just have introduced something new in beachwear.

The world survived. And so did the bikini.

 

 

Bikini Atoll is however a bit worse-for-wear!
(From “I Wish I’d Thought of That” Globe Communications Group, Boca Raton -FL 1998)