In Praise of the Bikini (and Ursula Andress)

It’s hot as hell here today. And you can see flat water all the way out to the horizon line. The beach is shimmering with skin, sun and sand.

When I came inside for a peach it was so cool that I turned on the TV and that old James Bond movie, Dr. No, with Sean Connery (the best James Bond ever) was on. “The movie that started the ’60s spy craze is high-spirited fun and action all the way,” according to my Blockbuster Video movie guide. But what everybody remembers most is how great Ursula Andress looked in that little brown buckskin bikini when she first appeared on the screen.

“Now that’s a woman,” my girlfriend said when she walked in to the room. Then she went off on a little diatribe about all those anorexic little things walking on the beach today without any flesh or muscle tone.

Which, of course, is the beauty of a bikini – all the many different curvy, shapely, busty, bodacious, badass, babe-licious ways that woman’s bodies look in them. A bikini without a body is like a candy wrapper after the chocolate is gone.

Online I found out that French car engineer Louis Reard invented the bikini in 1946 (after taking over his mother’s lingerie company – get as Freudian as you want with that one). He named it after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands where we were conducting nuclear tests at the time.

With all the fireworks, fantasies and photographs that the swimsuit has inspired, it seems an appropriate marriage: French fashion and American bombs.

Wikipedia tells me that Parisian stripper Micheline Bernardini was the first to publicly model summer’s greatest accessory, at a poolside fashion show in Paris on July 5, 1946. And that the two hankies of cloth were banned from the Miss World contest until 1951 – the very Mecca of swimsuit competition!

The entry also says that “The bikini is perhaps the most popular female beachwear around the globe, according to French fashion historian Olivier Saillard, due to “the power of women, and not the power of fashion.” He adds, “The emancipation of swimwear has always been linked to the emancipation of women.”

Next, there are entries on “mankinis” (think Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat), string bikinis, thong bikinis and even sports bikinis.

At www.bikini.com I end up checking out “Karate Hotties” and “All Star Sizzlers” (somebody’s gotta do the research on this one).

Then it’s time to get back outside, to see real bikinis. And real women.