Bitch Media: Weapons of mass distraction. How the bikini turned sexuality into a threat

One sun-baked morning in Cannes, as vacationers ordered their mimosas and stretched out in beach chairs, an airplane rumble joined the sound of waves lapping and glasses being set down on tables. Sunbathers tipped up their faces to find a message smoking in the sky: “Atome—the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Some weeks later, another plane made its way across the French Riviera, this time hired by a competitor. “Bikini—smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world,” the skywriter wrote. The intrigue had begun. The bikini made its debut in 1946. After a long war filled with air raids and rationing books, Europe was experiencing its first conflict-free summer in five years. Needing a return to normalcy, people packed up their cars with coolers and colorful beach umbrellas and headed off for weekends full of sea and sun.

Designer Louis Réard was one of those people, and it was in the French Riviera that he noticed that, after an afternoon of sunbathing, women would sit up and roll down their two-piece suits to get better tan lines. Inspiration struck, and he soon designed a piece that revealed “everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name.” Réard debuted his creation, made from a scant 30 inches of fabric, at a Paris poolside press show on July 5, 1946. No model was willing to touch it, so Réard did the only sensible thing he could: He hired a Parisian showgirl named Micheline Bernardini to showcase it. Much to the shock of the press, she fit the suit into a matchbox that she was holding in the palm of her hand. The world was agog. There was pandemonium. Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe might have regularly worn two-pieces in pinup photos, but they never put their belly buttons on display. From the moment it debuted, the bikini was a scandal.

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