bikini

Hey July,

I’m not ready for you yet. I mean my body definitely needs at least a month of going to the gym before you knock on my door. Can you please go home and come back in a month? can we all pretend we are still in June? As I’m fighting with July in my head, I’m skimming through different articles about swimsuit history on the internet. It goes back to a month ago when I was visiting my family in San Francisco. On my fifth day there, we decided to go to Capitola Beach. On our way coming back from the beach, A small billboard caught our eyes in the parking lot. The billboard was showing a picture from early 1900s, five women wearing gowns on the beach. Automatically, the very first thing crossing my mind was, why are they wearing gowns to the beach?! So, That Image in Capitola Beach inspired me to learn more about swimsuit history and share it with you guys.

• Swimsuit History: 

A Parisian engineer, Louis Reard, invented the bikini in 1946. He designed the bikini while working at his mother’s lingerie shop. He named it after the cite of the atomic bomb testing that year; because he thought the public reaction would be like the Atomic Bomb explosion. And, he was Right! His design was based on exposing the belly button for the first time. The bikini was so scandalous that no French models accepted putting it on, so he ended up hiring a stripper to model his bikini.

Before the bikini, most women wore one-piece swimsuits, and if they were having a two-piece on, it would be still very modest and expose a little midriff. Also, they always kept the belly button covered and away from sun.Before that, women wore these bathing costumes, which covered every part of their body, and they used this thing called “ Bathing Machine”. Bathing Machine was a 6x6x6 wooden box or basically a cabana on wheels. The woman would get inside the bathing machine in her regular clothes, and then change into her bathing costume. Horses or sometimes people would drag the bathing machine to the shoreline where the woman would get straight in to the water from the cabana, so that no one would see her in her bathing costume.

We Have Certainly come a long Way since then!

We go to the beach today and you see almost everyone wearing all sorts of different bikinis, which wasn’t an instant hit for the USA back in 50s. In 1957, Modern Girl magazine said, “It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.” Plus, One more writer described bikini as a two-piece bathing suit that revealed everything about a girl except for her mother’s maiden name. So, we can say there was a law of wearing swimsuits on public beaches. Guards at the beach would measure women’s baiting suits, and women wearing bikinis were sure to get kicked off of the beach.

With the 1960s however, it came with the sexual revolution, women’s movement, and rising popularity of the bikini. Soon no one was afraid to wear one, and show her belly button some sunshine. In 1965, a woman told Time Magazine that it almost “Square” to not wear bikini.In 2012, annual spending on the bikini was 8 billion dollars, and the fame of bikini has been tribute to the “ Power of Women” and not “ the power of fashion.”

Ok now, if you are as curious as I am about how we went from beach gowns to up our butts, join me in a minute stroll through the years of swimsuit history.

• 1893

• 1940s

• 1946

• 1950s

• 1960s

• 1970s

• 1980s

• 1990s

I hope You enjoyed it, 

Until Then, 

Xoxo 

Parmsi