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.
