The bikini is 70 years old today.
Photographs by Harsh Man Rai
The bikini is 70 years old today. It was on July 5, 1946 that French designer Louis Reard unveiled the then daring two-piece swimsuit on model Micheline Bernardine at a swimming pool in Paris. He gave it the iconic name because the biggest news of that month was the fact that US had begun a series nuclear tests on a serene group of islands called Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. To honour this historic occasion, here’s a replug of our first bikini cover shoot from March 2001, that also launched the career of model and actress Yana Gupta.