When was the bikini invented? From history.com: If you like or wear bikinis, you can thank Louis Réard, the French designer who came up with the then-revolutionary design in the 1940s. The revolutionary part wasn't the two-piece nature of the bikini — European women had been wearing two-piece bathing suits since the decade before. But those existing two-pieces were pretty conservative, even if they did lack the traditional skirts; they had halter tops that left very little of the midriff in view.That wasn't the case with the skimpy bikini of Réard's creation, which he described as "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit," according to History.com. He debuted the design on July 5, 1946, but as you might imagine, he didn't do so personally: Micheline Bernardini, a Parisian showgirl, modeled the suit in
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