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player ready...Yesterday we celebrated the day the United States adopted the Declaration of Independence, the magnificent document that transformed and codified the world’s concept of equality. Ever since Lincoln refocused the country’s attention on it at Gettysburg, it has said the most about liberty in the fewest words.
Today, if we want to extend the holiday another day, we can celebrate a very different, and admittedly far more trivial, kind of liberty. Today, July 5, is the day the bikini swimsuit made its debut in a Parisian swimming pool.
How it came to be says a lot about war. The bikini was born in 1946. A year earlier, Robert Oppenheimer had tested the first implosion-style atomic bomb, a type of bomb many were certain wouldn’t work because the mechanism had to be very precise. Even when it did, over Nagasaki, the military still didn’t trust it.
So on July 1, 1946, the first post-war atomic test was made in the northernmost part of the Marshall Islands. The bomb, named Gilda after an explosive character in a black-and-white film that year, was dropped on a peaceful atoll that was graced with a large, quiet, fish-filled lagoon.
The residents of the atoll, which was named Bikini, were “temporarily” removed to a nearby island, and a fleet of 95 ships was assembled in the lagoon. The goal was to see how much damage a bomb detonated 500 feet above them would do. Not much, as it turned out.
That summer was, of course, the first one without war. The fortifications to thwart invasions had been removed from the beaches, rationing was largely over, consumer goods were once again being produced, and the mood of the people was jubilant.
This was especially true in Paris, where a designer named Louis Reard had invented a swimsuit that used only a scant 30 square inches of cloth. Because he was sure it would be as explosive and newsworthy as America’s atom bomb test four days earlier, he called it the bikini.
Compared to the swim suits of the day, which resembled waterproof upholstery, it was, so much so that none of the regular swimsuit models would wear it. Reard eventually found a dancer named Micheline, whose modesty had apparently evaporated while performing in a Paris casino. She modeled the suit and won the hearts of tens of thousands of Frenchmen who wrote her love letters.
So today, on this beautiful leisure weekend, we have a chance to celebrate something lighthearted and reflect on something serious. Our cold war paranoia ended the lifestyle of the poor residents of the Bikini Atoll. We dropped two more plutonium bombs there, followed by 20 additional hydrogen bombs. The island remains uninhabitable and, except for SpongeBob Squarepants fans, remains largely unknown.
Deprived of their lagoon, the islanders could no longer fish from their canoes. They remain on a small island that is sadly, thanks to climate change, slowly being swallowed by the sea. But as a result of their devastation no other islands were destroyed because the world came to realize how horrible atomic tests are, and they are now universally forbidden. That is something worth celebrating.
The bikini swimsuit became enormously popular in Europe. Decades later, more modest versions began showing up in uptight America. But very recently, there have been some remarkable developments. Bikinis are now being worn by all body types. No longer is a person too heavy, too old, too stretch marked, or too anything to wear one. And this year there are at least two designers making bikinis for breast cancer survivors. Perhaps that’s a different kind of liberation, but I think it’s worth celebrating too.
Bill Mego is a freelance writer.