Bikini Story. Patrik Alac

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СКАЧАТЬ was posing for the same photographers at the same time. Smiling brightly, one leg carefully in front of the other, she had climbed onto an upturned crate and had assumed the stance of the celebrated Statue of Liberty that welcomes new arrivals across the Atlantic in the New York harbour.

      That first bikini had an astonishing impact in terms of the material. What seemed from a distance to be cloth with a pattern on it – flowers perhaps – turned out on closer inspection to be a collage of newspaper cuttings and headlines. The bikini, thus, took every advantage of the media uproar it was bound to provoke, using every means it had in hand.

      This light-hearted, yet explicitly knowing gesture by the designer could not emphasize more perfectly the complexity of ways in which this tiny costume would be important. Fashionable and contemporary, shocking by being the least it could possibly be, the bikini, nonetheless – from the very first photo shoot, and in the most public way – set itself up as being far more than it truly was: a scrap of cloth in which a person could go swimming. It embodied fashion’s ideals to be more than just an item of clothing, to tell a story, to emanate an aura of imagination and mystique around itself and around the person wearing it.

      Fashion, after all, is nothing without a human body on which to display it. It achieves significance only because the human body lends it life and purpose – although the reaction is reciprocal, for the fashionable object also lends the body some of its own qualities. Without clothing, the body is virtually without expression: the body has to rely on movement, on physical activity to be given any attention. Clothing without the body, meanwhile, is a skin that has been sloughed off, an empty envelope.

      It was precisely in this that Réard showed his genius, for he imbued his bikini with importance right from the start, integrating publicity for his creation within the creation itself. The creation thus promoted itself too. It was not simply an item of clothing but a dream, and the stuff of dreams besides.

      And so, on July 5, 1946, at the very beginning of the Cold War, when an atoll was reduced to ashes and humanity debated the consequences of the coming atomic age, all these considerations were for an instant concentrated in the lens of the camera that took the photo of Micheline Bernardini. The beautiful girl paraded once more in front of the astonished throng, hesitating as it was between applause and loud indignation, and then coquettishly made her exit – but not without one last smile from the back of a changing-room.

      On the following day nothing happened. A scandal was brewing in the city of Paris, still sweltering in its 35 °C (96°F), where the inhabitants crowded in amazing numbers around the edges of the swimming pools. Yet in the press there was no mention whatsoever of the incipient scandal of the previous day, neither in the newspapers nor in the fashion magazines.

      Photograph of participants for the title of the “Most Beautiful Swimmer”. Paris Press, July 6, 1946.

      This was evidently a new kind of scandal altogether, a totally silent one. Nothing was said about it on the following day, the following weeks, the following months, not even the following years. The scandal that was the bikini was just not talked about. Its impact could nonetheless be gauged in the numbers of the articles that shrilly praised all those swimsuits that were different from the “tasteless bikini”. But there was never any picture. Not even a description. You might well believe that the scandal was so serious that the only way to counter it was with utter silence.

      Conversely, during that summer of 1946, everybody was talking about Heim’s sensational Atome. It was the first fashion season after the war and the general mood was to celebrate the return of freedom. The fashion magazines duly gave themselves entirely over to Heim’s work.

      Publicity for Heim’s “revolutionary” two-piece outfits – featured on streamers towed behind light aircraft carriers over France’s Côte d’Azur, and describing the Atome as “the smallest swimsuit in the world” – was at once parried by Réard (who was of course equally astute in the art of advertising). His slogan was “The bikini – the bathing costume even smaller than the smallest swimsuit in the world.” Women and girls on the beaches followed the trend, even if they did not buy Réard’s costumes: it was not difficult, after all, with some deft tucks to adapt a classic two-piece costume at home and turn it into what looked like a bikini that showed almost as much bare skin as the original. It was not until 1954 that Réard was finally allowed advertising space, in the Vogue summer special.

      In fact, the magazine had not remained silent on the subject for all the intervening period. In 1948 it had expressed its own opinions on the thorny matter, commenting, also, that current beachwear was distinctly improving, and even returning to some pretensions of elegance.

      The colours and materials of the extremely brief two-piece costumes were undoubtedly nice to see. But, if we may say so, those who wore them had something of the look of shipwreck survivors, haphazardly covered in scraps and tatters of cloth no larger than a handkerchief.

      Nuclear testing on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, July 1, 1946.

Symbols

      Our bomb is the blossoming out, the natural expression in all its truth and glory, of our society – just as Plato’s Dialogues were the expression of the ancient Greek polis, as the Coliseum was of ancient Rome, as Raphael’s Madonnas were of Renaissance Italy, as the gondolas were of aristocratic Venice, as the tarantellas were of certain rustic but musical Mediterranean communities… and as the extermination camps are for our petty-minded bureaucracy which seems already to contain a rabid desire for atomic suicide.

      This paragraph, written by Elsa Moranle (“For and Against the Atomic Bomb”, Conference at the Teatro Carignano, Turin), claims to pinpoint the image that identifies and characterizes our times. It is that of the atomic explosion and its mushroom-shaped cloud – an image in which all the mental and technological efforts of the past two and a half centuries of “progress” are concentrated, representing both goal and result. But the words also throw light on another side of our civilization: the accompanying desire in our frenetic activities for self-destruction. Like a poisonous mushroom, the atomic bomb has become the symbol for the last 50 years. It shines like an artificial “orange, wine-red, green, and light grey” sun over empty beaches. When humanity ate for the second time the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, humans got nothing better or more spiritual out of it than the introduction into this “other Eden, demi-Paradise” a series of scientifically applied atomic tests. But what satisfaction there was on the faces of those lit up by the artificial sun! What pleasure there was in finally having at one’s command a weapon that could affect the collective suicide of humanity! What a blessed relief it was to know that it all might no longer exist – the world, humankind, life, dreams and aspirations – and that if things did not measure up and a better future could not be foreseen, one could at least annihilate everything at the press of a button. “An apple from the Garden of Eden” might well describe the circular steel construction designed during World War II and the cheerfully christened Gilda, an image of the perfect woman painted on its outside casting. The term might also be applied to the space-probe sent a few decades later into the depths of the universe containing within it an outline sketch of the human form. Humanity, looking to exterminate itself while yet seeking to preserve the memory of its life-form among distant galaxies, resembles nothing more than a spoiled child who has not received the birthday present longed for, and so in a tantrum destroys all the rest.

      Jacques Heim examines his sketches for the “Maid of Cotton 1962”.

Jacques Heim

      Jacques Heim was born in Paris in 1899, the son of Isidore and Jeanne Heim, Polish-Jewish immigrants who had already acquired French nationality and set up, СКАЧАТЬ