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BIKINI MODELS [free amateur bikini photo gallery] 1. A very brief, close-fitting two-piece bathing suit worn by women. 2. A very brief, close-fitting bathing suit worn by men. Four days after an atomic bomb exploded on little Bikini Atoll in the remote Pacific Ocean, the little bikini exploded into the French language and then into English. On July 5, 1946, Louis Reard revealed to the fashion world of Paris a shockingly skimpy swimsuit he had designed, consisting merely of four triangles of material strategically placed on the female body and held in place by thin straps. No decent woman would think of wearing one; Reard couldn't get any fashion models in town to show it off. But he was able to recruit a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris to pose in the garment, and the rest was front-page history throughout the civilized world. The French couturier called his sensation a bikini, shamelessly appropriating the name of a place half a world away that had just been the site of an equally sensational news event: the first peacetime explosion of a nuclear weapon. That event was the first of twenty-three American nuclear tests that would extend more than a decade, including a fifteen-megaton H-bomb explosion on March 1, 1954. The tests contaminated Bikini with so much radiation that the survivors and descendants of the 167 pre-bomb inhabitants are still exiles, having been shuttled from island to island while the cleanup of their homeland continues. Meanwhile, although the bikini was an instant success in the English language, it took much longer to become acceptable beachwear. Brian Hyland's 1960 hit song "Itsy-Bitsy-Teenie-Weenie-Yellow-Polka-Dot Bikini" helped it along, as did the beach movies and liberated styles of the 1960s. Nowadays Bikini itself is visited by tourists wearing bikinis. The food produced at the Bikini Atoll is still too contaminated for permanent residents, but because of the warships sunk there in the first two bomb tests, the Bikini lagoon is now rated among the top scuba diving destinations in the world. The name Bikini is from the Marshallese language, spoken by about 30,000 people in the Marshall Islands. It belongs to the Micronesian subgroup of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian. No other words from Marshallese have made their way into present-day English. Source: Answers |
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