A Little Bikini History

photo credit: allerleirau

For those of you who keep up with such things, here’s a bit of trivia: The bikini is now in its 64th year.

Who cares, and why do I know this?   Because a while back I  wrote this article about the world’s smallest fashionable fabric icon back when she turn 60.  Proving once again that I have a vast knowledge of the mostly useless!

Sparkle and Dolly and I, along with two of their friends are headed to Charlotte today to see Coldplay. It started out as a family outing, but the girls ended up selling The Man’s and my tickets to friends.  I’ll get over it.

We’re taking two cars because The Man is on his way back from London and meeting us in Charlotte.  Even though I would have loved to see Coldplay, I’m glad he will be around to not go to the concert with me.  I don’t think he, or guys in general  give a rip about Coldplay. Maybe we’ll go out to dinner, squint, and pretend like we’re in France.

When the Grand Strand’s teen and 20 somethings hit the beach this summer, they’ll be wearing bikinis not so different from ones their grandmothers used to wear. Theoretically could have worn, anyway.

The bikini, defined as being a two-piece bathing suit that dips below the navel, may be turning 60, but is nowhere near ready for retirement. In fact, the fashion icon was a late bloomer. On many family-oriented U.S. beaches, it didn’t gain its top drawer wardrobe status until decades after its debut in post World War II France.

Louis Reard, a car designer by trade and son of a lingerie shop owner, had observed that women, thrilled to be allowed to go back to the beach in the two years after liberation from Nazi Occupation, were experiencing a second liberation, ooh laa laa, rolling and hiking up their swimsuits for maximum sun exposure along the beaches of St. Tropez. He unveiled the first bikini on July 5, 1946, on the dazzling form of a Parisian dancer, the only model he could find willing to wear the garment made from 30 square inches of fabric.

Initially, the bikini was dismissed as a failure. Women outside of France were no where near ready to don the scandalous design. Spain, Portugal and Italy banned the suit. In the conservative minded U.S., Vogue in 1954 was still promoting swimsuits with small jackets, so women “could look more dressed, than undressed.” “And God Created Woman” featuring Brigitte Bardot in a scant bikini was released in the U.S. in 1958 bringing the suit to the attention of the American masses. Then in 1960 Cosmopolitan ran an article proclaiming “Bikinis are Here!”

Epitomizing the ambiguity surrounding the bikini, Annette Funicello with her quintessentially “good girl” image, was not allowed by Walt Disney to wear a bikini alongside her cast mates in the first six installments of the Beach Party movie series of the early ‘60s. When Disney allowed his protégée to bare her navel in the last installment, “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini,” in 1965, he was in effect giving permission to teenage girls everywhere to wear one too.

But just because something was going on in California didn’t mean it was happening on the Grand Strand of South Carolina.

“It must have been around 1960 and I remember being on the beach with my mom, and her discretely pointing to a woman and whispering ‘that’s a bikini,’ in a way that really stuck in my memory,” said Beth Ervin, a lifelong resident of Myrtle Beach.

Along Grand Strand beaches in the 1960s it was not unusual to see children wearing belly button baring two piece suits. George Mims, a Myrtle Beach resident who was a lifeguard on Myrtle Beach’s north end through 1967, recalls, however, that few teenage and older females wore bikinis. “It was a rarity,” said Mims.

Throughout the 1960s newspapers such as The Charlotte Observer and The Winston Salem Journal would contact area photographer and historian, Jack Thompson, in search of photographs of bikini clad teenagers to show their readers what supposedly was going on along Myrtle Beach’s shoreline. However Thompson was under a directive by the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce to resist taking photos of this sort.

“The mommas who were very influential on the Myrtle Beach Chamber wanted to maintain Myrtle Beach’s image as a moral and family fun oriented beach,” said Thompson.

Thompson would cleverly fulfill the requests from out of town newspapers by shooting a pretty girl wearing a bikini from behind, perhaps coyly looking over her shoulder. In another instance, he shot a model at sunset in silhouette, showing her curves, but not her navel.

Thompson recalls local police officers notifying women wearing skimpy bikinis and even men wearing Speedos that these revealing styles were not allowed in Myrtle Beach.

Eventually the magnitude of tourists, as well as the magnitude of radical cultural changes overpowered the local guard of decency. By the early 1970s it became apparent that the bikini was here to stay.

The first Miss Bikini Wahine pageant was held in conjunction with the Sun Fun Festival and Miss Sun Fun in 1972. Peggy Sansbury, a Myrtle Beach resident, won the Miss Marion title in the mid ‘70s. Her sponsor insisted she choose to participate in Miss Bikini Wahine, because of the visibility it would bring to Marion as a small town near the well-known Myrtle Beach.

“My bikini was lime green and about two inches below my belly button and not high cut on the leg like they wear today. The girls I was placed between were wearing much more revealing styles and were much more voluptuous which I thought was what the judges were looking for. I won and it was shocking,” said Sansbury. “… my mother took me and my father didn’t come, because he said, ‘you’ll never win that one.’”

Sansbury believes that she captured the Miss Bikini Wahine title with her more conservative suit was a reflection of the image Myrtle Beach was trying to hold on to.

For little girls who grew up in the ‘60s wearing bikinis, the most natural thing was to continue to do so, if they pleased as they became teenagers in the ‘70s. These days the bikini is the swimsuit style favored by young beachgoers, with area teens usually owning several.

Mix and match top and bottoms, cover-ups and accessories have played an important role as some women choose to wear bikinis beyond their 20s. The tankini, a higher cut leg and other ways of strategically adding or subtracting fabric have made the style more accessible for women of various ages and body types.

And what do the next sixty years hold for the world’s smallest fashion icon? Don’t go looking for the thong on area beaches anytime soon. They are illegal. Yes, much to the relief of many area residents and tourists of the Grand Strand’s family friendly beaches, the fabric frontier seems to be holding.

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