THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Réard was sure his itty-bitty two-piece would be as explosive as a war bomb, which is why he named his design after the remote island Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. military performed news-making atomic bomb tests that very week. “In 1946, France had just come out of the war and people had need to live again. I felt I had to design something that would make people understand that life can start over and be beautiful,” Réard told The Dispatch in 1974. “At that time everybody spoke of the island of Bikini in the Pacific, enchanted, tiny, fine sand, a paradise. The idea came to me to make a swimsuit tiny like that island.”

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