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.