Beach and the Bikini

Louis Reard and the bikini

Wikipedia photo

I remember the two-piece swimsuits of my youth, hard to find and quite demure by today’s standards but shocking by early 20^th century modest attire.  When women dared for the first time to wear a one-piece bathing suit and later a two-piece swimsuit to the beach, it was quite radical and scandalous.

Historically, evidence has been found of bathing suit-style clothing in 5600 B.C. and at athletic events in Rome. The most famous and best-preserved evidence discovered consists of the mosaics in Villa Romana del Casale.

Quite fitting, the Villa Romana del Casale, an elaborate fourth century A.D. Roman villa, was found about 3 km from the town of Piazza Armerina, Sicily, a place bathed in sunshine, resplendent with beaches, and a balmy Mediterranean climate.

Photo: italianways.com

In modern times, women used two-piece bathing suits as early as the 1930s, but the infamous bikini did not appear on the beach scene until 1946, the creation of a Frenchman, Louis Reard, an automobile and clothing designer.

He dressed a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline, in a two-piece bathing suit on July 1946 and introduced her to the public at Piscine Molitor, a popular and fashionable public pool in Paris. It happened three weeks after atomic bomb tests were conducted by the United States on the Marshall Islands Pacific atoll named Bikini, so he decided to name his creation “the bikini.”

The amount of fabric used for such a piece of clothing varies today on the amount of covering it offers to the chest and to the bottom area. The most recent swimsuits are just G-strings, exposing plenty of the human anatomy. However, it is still modest by European nude beach rules.

Going to an American beach today is an interesting fashion show both in clothing choices or lack thereof and in artistic tattoos on various parts of the beach goer’s bodies.

Young and nubile women are sporting naked rears, their breasts spilling out of tiny strips and other unmentionables barely covered, stretching provocatively in the sand to the delight of ogling men who enjoy the narcissistic show. One can barely blame them as so much is on display and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

At the other extreme, women in full burkas with their kids and husbands in tow, sweating in black, covered from head to tow while their husbands are wearing comfortable American swim trunks. Perhaps there should be a middle ground between the skimpy bikinis and the burka tents.

Older men are wearing tiny Speedos, confident in their athleticism and manliness, with skin so tanned and dry that it looks positively mummified.

Seaside attire is not the only curiosity at the beach. Young women with verbal diarrhea use the English language in a way that would horrify anyone sitting in their hearing range – the F word or other choice vulgar expressions pepper their vocabulary every other word. Drinking like sailors regardless of age and smoking like chimneys on a cold day, completes the picture of our young American progenies at the beach.

So much societal degradation on display makes me sad. Perhaps I am too old to appreciate “progress,” and the new “feminism.”