Happy Birthday To The Bikini

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the bikini.

No, not this bikini.

I'm talking about this kind!

So scandalous was the first modern-day bikini that the only female free-spirited enough to pose in one was a stripper. Parisian engineer-turned-designer Louis Reard released the suit at a fashion shoot on July 5, 1946. It was cut high on the hip, but the really stunning feature was that it bared the navel, a part of the body that in modern history had been off-limits for public display.

The tiny two-piece shocker signaled the coming transformation of attitudes toward the body. Still, it would take more than a decade for most American women to get comfortable with wearing the skimpy suit.

The baring of the belly button was the big hurdle.

"I can't think of any situation in the thousand years before the '60s when it was acceptable to show the navel, '' said Kevin Jones, a curator and fashion historian at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles.

Maybe so, but as the article points out, the bikini wasn't invented in 1946. It was only re-introduced. According to Wikipedia (font of all knowledge) "Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes have been observed on Greek urns and paintings, dated as early as 1400 BC."

Here's a scene from the famous Roman "bikini girls" mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale in Italy, which dates to the early 4th Century A.D.

(The chick on the left demonstrates something the Romans liked to call "nipplae slipae.")

Over the course of this blog, I've done a couple of bikini related posts. Let's take a look back, shall we?

Two years ago, I linked to a swimwear poll, which revealed that 7 out of 10 women own a bikini, and California girls prefer low-rise bottoms, while East coast girls like a mid-rise.

Last winter, I went all out and did a bikini fashion preview. In that post I predicted that polka dots would be "in," and I was right. I saw polka dots all over the place. Speaking of nipus slipus, that was the post where I coined the term ""dunstation."

I'll probably toast the bikini's 60th birthday with a fruity drink and a swim after work. That sounds like a plan. How will you celebrate?