Bikini: The style of fun and freedom

Women Fashion

-Staff

By Staff

Saturday, February 2, 2008, 11:07

"Since the beginning, the bikini has represented freedom, fun, and a sense of liberation."

You might have seen and wondered at women walking across sea shores and even in public with almost nothing on their body but two tiny pieces of cloth. The almost invisible cloths are nothing but a great fashion trend in women's wears, the bikini. Seeing the above quotation you may logically think that, can nudity be called freedom? Can shedding all your dress be called liberation? And is displaying your body called fun? However, no other dressing style of the 20th century has attracted the female generation so eminently like a bikini.

The history of the bikini begins far before the official introduction of the bikini swimsuit in the summer of 1946. The history of the bikini, however, may begin nearly 2000 years sooner than even ancient Rome. Minoan wall paintings from approximately 1600 B.C. also depict women wearing the seemingly quite popular two-piece bathing costume. The swimsuit designed in 1946 was named the Atom because of its minuscule size.

The bikini made its first proper introduction to the world of fashion design on July 5, 1946, as it is was worn and displayed at a Paris fashion show by French model Micheline Bernardini. Reaction to the bikini was immediate and explosive. Needless to say, most of those who viewed the new swimsuit were equally shocked and titillated by its minimalist style. The bikini has now become such an entrenched part of swimsuit design that it is a wonder the modern swimsuit is only 60 years old. True to its explosive nature, the bikini has inspired even more shocking innovations in swimsuit design, including the short-lived monokini and the immensely popular thong bikini. The term bikini has now become so lodged in the vocabulary of swimsuits that several new types of swimsuits have spawned from it, including the bandini, tankini, camikini, and monokini.

There are so many interesting factors about the bikini:

Louis Reard"s original bikini consisted of only 30 square inches of fabric and no model was ready to wear the skimpy garment in the Paris Fashion Show. Finally, he hired Micheline Bernardini, a model who also worked as a nude dancer in a Paris nightclub to debut the bikini to the fashion world. The release of the popular song, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" in 1960 rocketed the bikini swimsuit into a position of popular culture icon. In 1964, the bikini made it to the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time. The bikini became the official beach volleyball uniform for women when the Olympic Committee officially recognized the sport in 1993.

Today bikini is no more a dress that is considered vulgar or inadequate, but a fashionable clothing material. In films, in public events and on pleasure trips, women love to wrap them self in bikinis. Obviously, bikini is the trendy wear of 21st century that liberate women from the conventional wears that limit the fun and freedom of them.