The word bikini has rather an interesting etymology. Unlike the word
swimsuit, which is entirely functional and descriptive in its purpose,
the word bikini implies much more about the bikini’s history than it
does the bikini’s purpose.
Most scholars assume that the bikini swimsuit was named after the
famous Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. While it may seem
strange for the birthplace of the actual bikini swimsuit to be in
France and the birthplace of the name bikini to be in the South
Pacific, these two areas of the world actually had quite a bit in
common during the historical time period of the introduction of the
bikini.
When the bikini was introduced to the world in 1946, World War II had
just ended the spring before, and the world was still rollicking from
the horrendous nature of that war. After detonating the controversial
atomic bomb on two Japanese cities to end the Pacific war, the United
States was setting off further test bombs on the Marshall Islands
during that same summer. Needless to say, the destructive power of the
atomic bomb was still quite a shock to people around the world. While
Jacques Heim and Louis Reard were simultaneously inventing and
marketing their own versions of the bikini swimsuit, people all over
the world were marveling at the awesome power of the atomic bomb.
No one knows for sure whether Louis Reard was inspired enough by the
atomic bomb detonations in the Bikini Atoll to christen his swimsuit
the bikini or if he chose the name at random. Whatever the reason, the
name bikini stuck as the official title of the midriff-baring,
two-piece swimsuit. Many etymologists have assumed that Reard believed
his swimsuit creation would create a shock equal in its reverberation
to that of the atomic bomb (as it proved to do in the following years).
The term bikini has now become so lodged in the vocabulary of swimsuits
that several new types of swimsuits have spawned from it, including the
bandini, tankini, camikini, and monokini.
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