Lifestyles

When they hit the wave pool this summer, recent Montour High School graduates Jillian Bonkowski, 17, and Miranda Clark, 18, will each be wearing something that might have been worn by their grandmothers.

The bikini, that iconic summer perennial, celebrates its 60th birthday next month.

That doesn't seem to phase the two young women, who both live in Robinson.

"Styles have changed," Clark says.

"I'm fine with wearing it even if it is 60 years old," says Bonkowski, who swims in a Victoria's Secret bikini.

Summer without bikinis would be like Steelers games without Terrible Towels. Which makes us wonder why no one has thought to make one out of the other. After all, bikinis have been made from red fur, mink, jewels and porcupine quills.

All would pass muster with Jim Krenn, stand-up comic and co-host of the morning show on WDVE-FM.

"There's no bad bikini," he says.

"It's clearly become part of the scene," says Jamie Malanowski, managing editor of Playboy, which will commemorate the bikini in its August issue. "It's as emblematic of summer as a surf board or a hot dog at the beach. It's part of the culture now as opposed to something shocking or a novelty item or an item in the cultural wars."

The bikini debuted July 5, 1946, in Paris. Its inventor, an engineer named Louis Reard, could not find a model who would wear his scandalous two-piece navel-baring swimsuit on the runway. He hired a nude dancer named Micheline Bernardini to model it. He dubbed his creation the bikini, for Bikini Atoll, a South Pacific Island where America had tested an atom bomb the year before.

A designer named Jacques Heim already had devised his own two-piece bathing suit, which he named the Atome -- another nod to the vogue of the atomic particle. Heim called his Atome "the smallest bathing suit in the world." Reard advertised his bikini as "smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world."

Reard won this nuclear standoff, which is just as well. "How to Stuff a Wild Atome" would look pretty silly on a drive-in movie marquee.

"It's kind of one of those incredible trends -- how it happened, how it maintained itself and how many different types of lives it's had," says Sasha Charnin-Morrison, fashion director of US Weekly.

Her mother, Genii Charnin, who used to dance on Broadway, was arrested in the late '50s for wearing a bikini at Jones Beach near Long Island, N.Y., she says.

Her mother went to court but wasn't charged.

"The judge was pretty open minded," Charnin's daughter says. "She carried herself so well. It wasn't raunchy. At the time, it was pretty shocking."

No overnight sensation, the bikini took a decade to gain acceptance.

The Miss World Pageant banned bikinis in 1951. But Victorian mores couldn't compete with the formidable curves of Brigitte Bardot, who sported a bikini in the 1956 French film "And God Created Woman." When she climbed out of the water and onto a yacht in St. Tropez in one memorable scene, she became an international sex symbol.

But it took inane pop song drivel to help popularize the bikini on more conservative American shores.

In 1960, Brian Hyland's "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" became a No. 1 hit. It injected a frolicsome innocence into the bikini's image, with its lyrics about a modest girl who "was afraid to come out of the locker" in her bikini.

"In the '60s there was a burgeoning acceptance of or interest in sex," says Playboy's Malanowski. "The pill had been created. Playboy was born. The whole range of Hollywood starlets, from Monroe to Bardot to Jayne Mansfield, were much more overt in their sexual portrayals. The whole society was kind of opening to sexual ideas. The bikini just fit right into that. The Brian Hyland thing was a way of putting a vanilla coating on the same thing."

The bikini wasn't simply invented out of whole cloth, however. Two-piece garments are depicted in Minoan wall paintings from around 1600 B.C. and in Roman Mosaics from 300 A.D.

History is mum on what Roman men thought, or whether there was a Latin equivalent of "it must be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that."

Women wore two-piece suits during World War II, when the U.S. government ordered a 10 percent reduction in the fabric on women's bathing suits. But the bikini bared the navel, among other things.

Angie Fischer, 30, owner of Divine in Lawrenceville, recalls bikinis in the way she might recall birthday candles.

Her first bikini, which she got when she was 3, had yellow and pink stripes. When she was 6, she had a blueish-teal number.

"In high school, I had one that was pink velvet," she says with a cringing laugh.

"I can think back to all stages of my life," says Fischer, who lives in Fox Chapel. "I specifically remember my bikini. When it was time to go shopping every year, my mom would take my sisters and me to get a swimsuit. It was a huge event."

A mother, she's still wearing the classic. Last week, she wore a teenie weenie green polka-dot bikini from J. Crew when she took her kids to the pool.

Bikini history: A two-part series

1946: Engineer Louis Reard debuts his new creation, the bikini, in Paris. Reard names his suit the bikini, after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific.

1951: Bikinis are banned from the Miss World Contest. Organizers say the bikini might provide an unfair advantage to contestants who wear them.

1955: Actress Diana Dors sports a mink bikini at the Venice Film Festival. The following year, Brigitte Bardot wears a bikini in "And God Created Woman." Some cite this as proof that God is a man.

1960: Brian Hyland has a No. 1 hit with his self-penned song, "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini." The song helps introduce the bikini to American mass culture.

1962: Swiss actress Ursula Andress stars in "Dr. No," the first of the James Bond movie franchise. She creates a sensation when she walks out of the ocean in a two-piece white belted bikini with a knife holster. More than 40 years later, a replica of the suit is worn by Halle Berry in "Die Another Day."

1964: Sports Illustrated publishes its first swimsuit issue, with cover model Babette March modeling a white bikini standing in the waters of the Caribbean.

1966: The last of the six Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon beach movies premieres. The title, "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini," is more memorable than the film.

Circa 1970: The thong bikini or "tanga" makes its first appearance on the beaches of the French Riviera. A niche market is born. Ouch.

1983: Carrie Fisher appears in the famous gold bikini in "Return of the Jedi."

2000: Sisqo's randy hip-hop "Thong Song" becomes a summer hit.

Source: www.everythingbikini.com

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