This Day in History--July 5

On this day in 1946, fashion engineer Louis Reard of France unveiled what would become a new sensation: the bikini, a skimpy, two-piece woman's swimsuit. He couldn't find a model of haute couture to model the bikin, so he instead hired Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris.

He named the skimpy creation for Bikini Atoll, where the United States had recently exploded an atomic bomb. it's said that he thought the suit would have the same explosive effect as did the bomb.

The swimsuit was scandalous. billed as "smaller than the world's smallest swimsuit." It was a string bikini with a g-string back comprised of only 30 square inches of cloth and it was introduced at Piscine Molitor, a Paris public swimming pool.