Text by Ratna Rajaiah and Illustrations by Vinita Chand

So, what was all the fuss about four little triangles of cloth, totalling up to about as much fabric as it takes to make a sari blouse? Well, believe it or not, in Hollywood, it was about the matter of exposing the navel, an act that apparently amounted to such a severe form of indecent exposure that it was banned from Hollywood films! Okay, let me start at the very beginning, which, as Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music so perspicaciously pointed out, is a very good place to start.

By the time World War II had started in 1936, two-piece bathing suits had already made their appearance on and off screen and by the early '40s, many of the famous Hollywood beauties including Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner had all appeared in films wearing them. By the time the war had ended, the lusciously aquatic Esther Williams had made her tryst with stardom in the 1944 Technicolor spectacular, Bathing Beauty and as 'America's Mermaid', the two-piece bathing suit would soon become almost a second skin for her.

You'd think that in such a scenario, the world was ripe and ready for what made its debut on July 5, 1946 at a poolside show at the then famous Paris swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor. Four little (or shall we say itsy-bitsy?) triangles of cloth totalling to 30 inches held together by teeny-weeny bits of string. Its 'official' inventor, Louis Reard, estimated its impact would be no less explosive than the atomic weapons that the United States had just tested in the Bikini Atoll Islands just four days earlier…which is why he christened it 'le bikini'. And, since he could not find a model to wear it, he had to get Micheline Bernadini, a nude dancer from a Paris casino, to showcase it. Which was kind of odd because apparently French women had already been wearing the bikini for a year - only it was known only by the more modest 'French bathing suits' - a fact photographically recorded by Life in its July 16, 1945 issue. (Bernadini's little modelling assignment apparently got her 50,000 letters. According to one report they were fan mail; according to another, they were proposals of marriage!)

Odder still was the reaction in The United States of America. It was mostly priggish scorn. Actress, Esther Williams declared 'a bikini is a thoughtless act'. In an interview to Time in 1950, American swimsuit mogul, Fred Cole, said he had, "little but scorn for France's famed bikini bathing suits". According to him, the bikini was only to take care of the French girls' short legs because of which the "swimsuits have to be hiked up at the sides to make their legs look longer." The assumption being that since the American girls were naturally longer-stemmed, they would have no use for such a silly artifice. In 1951, Vogue primly proclaimed, "Our readers dislike the bikini, which has transformed certain coastlines into the backstage of music halls and which does not embellish women." Of course, this was before that flamboyant high priestess of fashion, Diana Vreeland, became its editor, because she, true to form, is reported to have said that the bikini is the atom bomb of fashion, justifying Reard's choice of name.