The Bikini Turns 60

Thank goodness for the tinkerer in the boutique:

The beginnings, however, were inauspicious. In 1946, Louis Reard, a car engineer who had taken over his mother's lingerie boutique in Paris, met with disbelief when he brought out a range of two-piece swimsuits made from just 70cm of cloth.

Although similar garments had been worn in ancient times, they were considered shocking in Reard's day. Provocatively, his garment revealed the navel - a part of the female anatomy banned as indecent from Hollywood films under the so-called Hays Code in the 1930s.

Not even his great rival, the French designer Jacques Heim, had been so daring. Heim boasted that his swimsuits were small but still covered le nombril.

Reard went a step further. "My bikini is smaller than the smallest swimsuit," he said.

And he caused such a scandal that he was unable to find a fashion model to wear his creation, which he had named after the Pacific atoll where the US had just carried out its first peacetime nuclear test. His reasoning was, apparently, that his invention would produce an atomic-like burst of excitement.

In the end, he persuaded Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer, to pose with it on. But sales were disappointing.

With his invention denounced as immoral by the Vatican, and banned by Spain, Portugal and Italy, Reard went back to designing orthodox knickers to sell in his mother's shop.