Bikinis and Fashion

Welcome to NetBikini.com, the home of all things bikini. Our mission is to bring you all the latest and best information regarding bikinis across the globe. This site is purely informational and we espouse no particular brand or product. In fact, we enthusiastically support all the different bikinis out there. This site will trace bikini fashions, bikini trivia, and bikini history from its ancient origins to its modern state. We eagerly welcome any questions, comments, or concerns you may have to help us make this site even better. Thank you for stopping by!

     The bikinis current incarnation began in the mid 1940’s when first created by French engineer Louis Reard. But the truth is bikinis date back to at least the earliest of antiquity. Figures and paintings of bikini-like garments have been discovered in the ancient city-state of Catal Huyuk which fell around 5700 BCE. The ancient Greek states favored this sort of garb for women when women even chose to wear clothes at all. In short the bikini has been a popular woman’s garment across vast stretches of time in many different lands across the globe.

     Bikini inventor Louis Reard offers two equally amusing anecdotes for how he chose the name bikini. His first swimsuit design was a very skimpy one-piece which was almost a bikini except that it had a thin back strap which connected top and bottom pieces. Reard called this suit the Atome, which means atom in French, due to its small skimpy size. During this same time the USA was conducting nuclear bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific causing great international stir and outrage. He called his second truly two piece swim suit a Bikini after the island in which so much to do had been made, knowing his swimsuit would cause a similar reaction. Reard then retroactively described his first suit as a monokini, borrowing the Latin prefix for one, and incorporated the bi in bikini to mean two. Louis Reard then cleverly bolstered his analogy by claiming that he had split the atom and bombed the entire world with a controversial new fashion.

     An instant success in European countries, the bikini only served to ruffle feathers in more puritanical American society. Despite the fact that early bikinis would seem quite modest by modern standards, they succeeded in sparking moral outrage and controversy that would rage for nearly twenty years. The slow change of perception came in the early 1960’s as American’s had slowly gotten used to seeing glamorous European beauties scantily clad on the silver screen. Then as the beach party movie craze hit full force, youthful Americans who had now grown up with the idea of a bikini felt comfortable embracing the style as their own.

     Over the last fifty years, bikinis have become ever smaller. The g-string bikini, which leaves very little to the imagination, is a bikini that really only covers a woman’s front lower quadrant. Also called a thong, the g-string merely runs a thin strip of fabric around the woman’s backside to unite the front and back ends of the lower half. More modest modern bikini variations include the tankini, which is a two piece suit that’s top half is more like a tank top while the bottom half consists of bikini shorts.

     We hope you have enjoyed this brief introduction to the bikini. We acknowledge that it doesn’t cover everything, but neither does a bikini. Please feel free to visit the rest of this site for more comprehensive coverage of woman’s swimwear and accessories. Once again, we thank you for visiting our site and encourage you to send us any comments, questions, and concerns.

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