Pellau Magazine

In 1946, two distinct events overlapped in such a fashion as to forever link a swimsuit design with an island via a nuclear test. The island in question is Bikini Atoll, a ring-shaped coral reef island located in the Pacific Ocean within Republic of the Marshall Islands. It was there that the Unites States tested over twenty three atomic bombs between 1946 and 1958.

When the tests started on the atoll, it made the news the world over and it was through the news that the designer of the modern two-piece swimsuit, French engineer Louis Réard, heard about the Bikini Atoll. Réard was so confident his design, which revealed more of the midriff and chest than previous two-piece swimsuits had, would be as explosive in popularity as an atomic bomb that he named it the bikini in a nod to the location of the nuclear tests.