"YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AS DAZZLING AS YOUR SUBJECTS"

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

THE BIKINI IS SIXTY-FIVE YEARS OLD TODAY


LOUIS RÉARD 
INTRODUCES 
THE BIKINI  
July 5, 1946 


ON THE BEACH 
SOCHI (RUSSIA) USSR 1984 

1984 was the year Louis Réard, its inventor, died (at eighty-seven or eighty-eight, depending on who is counting). 

It is said that he was an automobile engineer, though whether of sleek racing cars, I have yet to discover.  His mother had a dress shop; Réard had a competitor; and "atomic" was in the air. So were the Bikini Atoll tests -- the first one had just been launched four days before -- and Voilà!  The Bikini was born. 

(That "atomic" had such power as a marketing device -- with a touch of magic? "awesome"? -- may not sound credible today.  But once upon a time ....) 

The bikini was certainly much in evidence in Soviet Sochi in the summer of 1984, when I was on my first trip to the USSR (see photograph above). 

The USSR, it turned out, had a bit more than seven years to run, to seventy-four (counting since the Revolution of 1917). 

The bikini is sixty-five today. 

The Winter Olympics are due to be held in Sochi in 2014. 

For more, see here and here and here (April 26 and April 28, 2009). 

No comments:

Post a Comment