It is a story of bizarre parallels. Sixty years ago, in July 1946, a Parisian automobile engineer pulled off a feat of postwar minimalism in his mother?s lingerie boutique near the Folies Berg?res. Louis R?ard designed a two-piece swimsuit for women out of just 70 centimetres of cloth. He was looking for a catchy name for this new figment of the Gallic imagination, and got it from the Americans.

Only a few months ago, the Americans had launched Operation Crossroads for ?the good of mankind and to end all world wars?. They were testing nuclear devices just off the Marshall Islands, north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean. This area, called Micronesia, was full of beautiful, inhabited coral reefs or atolls. The first explosion, of the size of the Nagasaki bomb, had just taken place on July 1, off the Bikini Atoll. This was still hot news in France on July 5, when Monsieur R?ard launched his new swimwear for women. He called it the bikini.

Cars, atom bombs and the bikini thus came together in the early years of the Cold War. And henceforth, the fate of the bomb and the bikini would remain fascinatingly intertwined.

M. R?ard had a competitor in the French designer, Jacques Heim, who had also launched, around the same time, his own two-piece called, interestingly enough, L?Atome. But R?ard?s product and name caught on. His two- piece was cut low enough to bare the navel at a time when the Hayes Code in Hollywood was continuing to ban the female navel from being exposed on screen. (Oddly, what seemed to shock the West about the bikini was not what it did to breasts and bottom, but this baring of the belly-button, which never was a problem in India.)

Beauty myth

No Parisian model would pose in R?ard?s bikini for the first publicity shots. So he had Mich?line Bernardini, a nude dancer at the Casino de Paris, to model for him in a bikini made out of newsprint-patterned fabric.

The disapproving Vogue editor called it ?the atom bomb of fashion?, while another French reporter compared Bernardini to a woman emerging in tatters from the sea after a marine nuclear explosion. ?The bikini,? the actor Esther Williams has said, ?is a thoughtless act.?

The Catholic countries banned it, but first the French and Latin Rivieras and then, less readily, Hollywood took it up. Chanel and every other fashion house worked ingenious variations on it. Brigitte Bardot in France, Raquel Welch as the Cave Girl in One Million Years B.C., and a series of James Bond heroines, from Ursula Andress to Halle Berry, saw the bikini through the Fifties and Sixties into the globalized Beauty Myth of the 21st century.

Throughout the Cold War years and afterwards, the rise of the bikini as a 20th-century icon parallels the history of American nuclear expansion: the human and natural devastation of Bikini and the atolls of Rongelap, Enewetak and Utrik, by exposure to radiation, and in more recent years, the legal and political struggle of the displaced Bikinians for redress.

This surreal mingling of sexiness and destruction, of two very different kinds of exposure ? the chic and the menacing ? is best caught in Brian Hyland?s 1960 song, ?Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini?. Its goofy male voice tells of a woman wearing her first bikini, terrified to come out of the locker room: ?She was afraid that somebody would see.? Even after she does manage to come out ?in the open?, she sits on the shore ?bundled up? in a blanket. And when she finally gets into the sea, ?she?s afraid to come out of the water/ And I wonder what she?s gonna do/ Now she?s afraid to come out of the water/ And the poor little girl?s turning blue.?