And, just so this is not a totally opportunistic post, a short history of the bikini:
The Bikini Syndrome:
In 1909, Australian Annette Kellerman was arrested on a Boston beach. Her crime? A polio victim, she’d taken up swimming to strengthen her legs. One day she wore a tight-fitting, black, wool one-piece suit that did away with the traditional skirts and sleeves that were hitherto de rigueur for women’s bathing costumes.GOODSTUFF is strutting Jayne Mansfield's stuff this week in his 148th edition. Wombat-socho has the great weekly Rule 5 Sunday post "Electric Avenue" up at The Other McCain on time and under budget.
“I can’t swim wearing more stuff than you hang on a clothesline,” the Diving Venus complained. The women’s one-piece swimsuit had arrived. Western civilization was headed towards perdition.
Call it the Bikini Syndrome, even though it came 37 years before the actual bikini. A Frenchman, Louis Reard, invented the bikini in 1946. He created a bathing costume so skimpy that it was first called Atome — in reference to the Atom Bomb that had just been exploded on Bikini Atoll. Though his design was a “bombshell,” he named it after the island, not the device.
When asked to describe what constituted a “true bikini”, he said it wasn’t a bikini unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring. Gotta love the French. . .
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