Bikini

Louis Reard was born on this day in 1896 in Lille, France.

A French automobile engineer, Reard joined his mother's clothing business and on July 6, 1946 earned the eternal gratitude of all admirers of the female form when he premiered his most famous fashion design, a mighty piece of engineering: a tiny two-piece cotton swimsuit which he dubbed the "bikini" after the nuclear test site on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean where the U.S. had detonated an atomic bomb 4 days earlier. Strapped onto the irresistible body of an unknown Parisian nude dancer named Micheline Bernardini at a Paris fashion show (as no runway model would agree to wear it), the bikini was an immediate international sensation, hitting newspapers around the world. Bernardini received over 50,000 fan letters.


Although initially no one took the garment very seriously as practical fashion (Diana Vreeland, for one, quipped that it revealed "everything about a girl except her maiden name," and the oft swimsuited Esther Williams called the bikini "a thoughtless act"), by the 1960s the two-piece swimsuit was an old standard to be found on beaches and around swimming pools everywhere.

For his own part, Reard insisted that the only true bikini was one which could be pulled through a wedding ring. Reard died on September 17, 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Think Pink!

Fashion editor and arbiter Diana Vreeland was born on this day in 1903 in Paris. As fashion editor and later editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar (1936-62) and editor of Vogue (1963-71), Vreeland was for many years a most forceful, charismatic, flamboyant and keeningly witty author of the last word on contemporary fashion and design.

Beginning with her "Why Don't You . . .?" columns in the 1930s, she drew dynamically upon images from a variety of exotic and old world sources -- from bullfighting to dance to gypsies to equestrians -- to juxtapose and astonish in the service of creating sophisticated image fantasies for a sophisticated audience of society dames, New York intellectuals and Broadway chorines. As Richard Avedon observed, "Vreeland invented the fashion editor. Before, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies."

Her observational bon-mots were legendary: "Pink," according to Vreeland, "is the navy blue of India"; and blue jeans, in her opinion, were "the most beautiful things since the gondola." But the wacky glibness of her commentary sometimes overshadowed the deliberateness of her visual sensitivities and propensities. Delighting in contrast, she sought in the visible world around her a balance between the refinement that had long been a hallmark of upper-class fashion as an indiom, with a sense of wildness and lively exploration, inviting cultural pluralism into women's wardrobes -- enticing smart women to wear "bright yellow shantung pyjamas," or dark red Louis XIV pumps "with a bright red handkerchief printed with wall-paper roses," or "little striped boleros trimmed with gold beadings and fringes," or an Italian driver's coat, or black astrakhan booties, or "a black wool skirt split to the knees, revealing a flask of [splendorous Hindu] parlor-pink pants" -- as a way to liberate and inspire.

Her expansive approach was easily parodied, and she was lampooned by Kay Thompson in Funny Face (1956, with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire), as the fashion editor who tells her followers to "Think pink!"

She died on August 22, 1989.

"She's a genius but she's the kind of genius that very few people will ever recognize because you have to have genius yourself to recognize it. Otherwise you just think she's a rather foolish woman." -- Truman Capote.

The Diving Venus

"There is nothing more democratic than swimming. Swimming, like running, is a sport that requires in its most basic mode no equipment other than one’s body." – Annette Kellerman.

Swimmer and silent film actress Annette Kellerman, known as the "Diving Venus," was born on this day in 1888 in Sydney, Australia. She apparently occupies a number of obscure but important niches in pop culture history: by legend, she was the first woman to attempt to swim the English channel; the first to perform underwater ballet, the forerunner to today's synchronized swimming; the first to brave North American shores in a one-piece swimsuit; and, as a pioneering athlete turned film star, the first celebrity to appear nude on screen.

Born with weak legs and requiring braces to walk, Kellerman began swimming at an early age as therapy. She moved with her family to England when she was 14, where her down-and-out father Frederick Kellerman promoted her swimming prowess shamelessly. After a series of local exhibitions, Mr. Kellerman announced to the press that his little Annette would swim 26 miles down the Thames from Putney to Blackwall, training on a diet of bread and milk. The teenaged Annette succeeded mightily, and thereafter earned a small fortune by performing other swimming feats, but failed twice to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel (a feat finally accomplished by Gertrude Ederle in 1926).

In 1907 she moved to the U.S., performing water ballet to packed houses at the New York Hippodrome and doing high diving stunts at Chicago's White City amusement park in the dead of winter. While visiting Boston's Revere Beach in 1907, Annette appeared before the assembled press in a tight-fitting boy's one-piece racing swimsuit -- demure by today's standards, amply covering both bottom and top, but scandalous by the standards of the day, which required a woman to wear skirts, bloomers and stockings when cavorting in the surf. The police arrested her on the spot (some would cynically say it was just another publicity stunt) and hauled her away.

Kellerman, however, was not so easily turned away: when she discovered that it was not the tightness that violated the law but the amount of flesh shown in the outdoors, Kellerman returned to Revere Beach wearing a modified version of her original one-piece, showing off her curvaceous figure (she was actually 5'-4" weighing 140 lbs; perhaps more chutzpah than cheesecake, although a gawking Harvard professor stammered that Kellerman was "the most beautifully formed woman of modern times") in her tight, scoop-necked, sleeveless black leotard and tights while still not showing more skin than the law allowed. The woman’s one-piece bathing suit was born -- or at least a standard which allowed a woman to wear tight-fitting garb. For Kellerman, it was a matter of sport, not fashion: "I can’t swim," she declared, "wearing more stuff than you can hang on a clothesline."

Her overnight celebrity caused Hollywood to take note, and Kellerman's swimsuit was shown off in a couple of quick newsreels in 1909. Kellerman made her bona fide film debut later that year, and starred in 8 features, including Neptune's Daughter (1914, directed by Herbert Brenon). Her most notorious appearance, however, was in Brenon's Daughter of the Gods (1916; produced by William Fox), by reputation a bit of overripe nonsense as cinema (it is now lost), but enormously popular on the strength of Kellerman's "startling nude scenes," including a bit of nude swimming (confirmed in surviving production stills) -- 78 years before another uninhibited Australian, Elle Macpherson, would cause barely a ripple by appearing nude for long glorious stretches of the film Sirens (1994). At any rate, Daughter of the Gods made a fortune for Fox and Brenon.

In 1918, Kellerman wrote a book, Physical Beauty and How to Keep It, in which she offered diet tips. Her film career ended in the 1920s, but Kellerman's tale was revived when Esther Williams portrayed her in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). Kellerman died on November 5, 1975 in Southport, Australia.