There is a symbolic date - Nicoletta de Menna tells us - to talk about the evolution of the swimming costume and, inevitably, of the common sense of decency: 1970 when the Brazilian model Rose de Primo, on the beach in Rio de Janeiro, wore a thong for the first time. Without bothering with anthropology, sociology or referring to the leather thong worn by some native tribes of the Amazon, that thong marks the end of a long tug-of-war, started at the beginning of the century and fought by inches, real inches, between the women of the so-called Western world and the guardians of order and morality.
From the summer of 1946, when for the first time a swimming costume was cut into two pieces, to Ursula Andress in that legendary bikini in "007 Licence to Kill". From respectable censorship to the sexual revolution. From the "two-piece" that showed the navel, to the thong that brought the "B side" to the beach. A fashion, a story, a revolution.
But to understand better, let's take a step backwards... The war ended and the Republic was born in Italy. Umberto di Savoia, the King of May, left Italy on 10 June for Cascais. Everywhere in Europe there were months of great confusion and attempts to reorganise civil life after the devastation of the war.
In Paris, the aim is to make up for the time lost during the occupation, long years that, while they have not weakened the mental resistance of Parisians, have instead brought one of the leading sectors of the French economy, fashion, to its knees. The boutiques reopened, the big fashion houses went back to work and with them textile production and the whole phantasmagorical world that revolves around it. There is a desire for normality, for lightness. A desire to forget.
At the beginning of 1946, designer Jaques Heim opened a chain of sportswear boutiques, thus giving new perspectives to his atelier, already active in the 1930s. In June, he launched a two-piece swimming costume called Atome, which was advertised as the smallest swimming costume in the world. However, the record only lasted a few days.
On 5 July of the same year, Louis Read showed a costume he called Bikini, which he described as 'smaller than the smallest swimming costume in the world'.
He advertises it by stating that a two-piece swimming costume could not be called a real Bikini if it did not fit inside a wedding ring or could not be contained by a matchbox.
Why he calls it a bikini is well known: a few days earlier - on 1 July - a nuclear experiment had been conducted in the Pacific Ocean at the atoll called Bikini as part of a naval exercise, the images of which had shocked public opinion. What is less well known is that Réard, first a mechanical engineer and then a fashion designer, had shattered a mental barrier, even more than a social one, by showing a woman's navel on 5 July 1946, and that nothing would ever be the same again.
You may think I'm exaggerating, but that's exactly what it is: in the 2000s we have long seen women and girls showing their bellybuttons on the catwalks and in everyday life, regardless of the seasons and temperatures. But in 1946 it was different: two-piece swimming costumes had been seen since the 1930s, first in the United States and then, timidly, in Europe.
But the underwear was high to cover the navel, leaving only the stomach uncovered. On the hips the fabric, or rather the new elastic fibres, wrapped and 'protected'.
Atome from 1946 (there had been a more chaste version launched by Jacques Heim in 1932) was already a daring model with the fabric going up only 4 fingers to cover the hips. This record was smashed in a few weeks by Bikini, two triangles up to below the navel held together by thin strips of fabric! The point was the belly button, a part of the body considered absolutely intimate until then. The impact on the public was so shocking that Réard initially couldn't find any professional models who could wear his creation naturally. And yet Paris was teeming with models at the time! The Maison Dior had just been founded. Balenciaga, who had never closed his atelier even during the Nazi occupation, was a reference point for the most elegant and wealthy women in the world. Schiaparelli, Lanvin, Patou... employed a host of beautiful girls; but none felt like posing in a Bikini and Réard eventually hired a 19-year-old stripper of Italian origin, Micheline Bernardini.
The men literally lost their heads while the women were almost intimidated. In just a few days, Bernardini received over 50,000 letters and an untold number of marriage proposals.
Despite the lightning start, the Bikini had a hard time making its way: in the United States it was the subject of an opposing respectable campaign that declared in magazines that classy ladies would never wear it!
In Italy the censorship of the Christian Democrats and the Church were stronger than any attempt at provocation and the Bikini, as well as the more chaste pre-war two-piece costume, were completely banned. In the 1950s it was not uncommon to see Carabinieri on Italian beaches armed with a tape measure to measure the conformity of beachwear to the canons of 'common decency', as they used to say.
That is, at least until 1957 when the poster for the film "Poveri ma belli" (Poor but Beautiful) publicly showed Marisa Allasio in a chastened two-piece costume: Pius XII cried scandal and the film was promptly seized the next day! Pius XII cried out in scandal and the film was promptly confiscated the next day. The image of Allasio was "covered" with a skirt and the film was finally released in theatres (Michelangelo and the "braghettoni" had set an example!). Still in 1963, the Minister of the Interior Mario Scelba sent a circular to the Questors and the General Command of the Carabinieri inviting them to "have appropriate measurements made of men's and women's costumes in order to avoid excessively skimpy clothing, which would be detrimental to the rules of modesty and decency". The circular was also accompanied by a scale model of a man's brief considered to be compliant. It was a real beach duel that women, regardless of nationality, would fight against censorship for many years: girls and ladies against men of order and guardians of decency armed with centimetres.
But the 'war of the centimetres' also involved men, who in the early 1950s wore waist-high swimming shorts with flaps or zips in front, strictly in plain colours. Then the waist gradually began to drop and the first patterns and colours appeared. We have to wait until the end of the 60s to see a significant revolution: from boxers we pass to tiny briefs (while hair grows very long) while patterns and colours explode. The demands for less 'plastered' and freer clothing should not be misleading as they seem a trivial matter. In fact, while carrying out an aesthetic revolution may certainly seem easier than affirming a cultural one, the former always leads the way for the latter.
Outside Italy, however, it was Margareth of England and Brigitte Bardot who made the final leap for the Bikini with a series of pictures taken in Cannes in 1953. Bardot's swimming costume was skimpy, although not like the one worn provocatively by Micheline, but in the meantime, times had come to maturity and women were beginning to love it and think they could dare.
As far as the granite British monarchy is concerned, which at the time made the photos of the Princess in the daring swimming costume disappear, we must give it credit for having been able to adapt to the evolution of the times; proof of this is the photo of the Duchess of Cambridge in a bikini a few years ago, a photo that was not removed from the web this time.
1962 was the year of weapons of mass distraction, as Ursula Andress was called when she came out of the water wearing a bikini and a dagger in the film "Agent 007 / Licence to Kill". Two years later (when the sexual revolution had not yet exploded) the Austrian Rudi Gernreich proposed the monochini, a panty with two crossed braces, some of you may remember. Undoubtedly the body, more than the costume, was becoming the real protagonist of this game. The next step in this "take away" journey takes us back to Rose de Primo and her thong worn at a party on Copacabana beach. The '80s, a new change in taste: from the small, tight briefs we return to the wide shorts, ever wider. California, its beaches and its lifestyle determined the aspirations and choices of entire generations. Primary and decisive colours are back on trend, Baywatch sets the standard!
In the 1980s, California was also the birthplace of the thong, worn for the first time in public 10 years earlier in Copacabana.
The tanga defined the canons of a new physicality, anticipating what would be the aesthetics of the 80s and the protagonism of the Top Models who would highlight a new lifestyle as well as a superlative season of international fashion.
Fashion, History, Fashion as always in a continuous intertwining
Nicoletta de Menna @nicoletta_de_menna Facebook e Instagram #lamodaraccontalastoria