Bikini

The bikini as a two-piece bathing costume for women only came into existence after the Second World War. The word dates from c.1946. Bikini was originally the name of an atoll in the Marshall Islands where the US carried out atom bomb tests from 1946 onwards. At about the same time, a certain Louis Réard (1897-1984), an automotive engineer by trade, was looking after his mother’s lingerie shop in Paris where he designed the first two-piece bathing costume for women, after observing how women would tuck up whatever they were wearing to get more of a sun tan. He thought the effect of his new garment on men would be as explosive as an atom bomb. Therefore, he decided to call it a bikini after the Marshall Island atoll but may have been influenced by the word’s first syllable bi- meaning two. The meaning of the word bikini in the Marshall Islands’ Polynesian language is not known.