Itsy bitsy, teenie weenie . . . bikini!

by Aline Mendelsohn

It was shocking, scandalous. So little fabric. So much skin.

But times changed, the bikini survived -- and it became a cultural icon.

This year, the bikini celebrates its 60th birthday. After all these years, it's still making a splash.

"The bikini's here to stay," says Kelly Killoren Bensimon, author of The Bikini Book, a new release that tracks the bikini's evolution.

"If it withstood all the chaos it's endured, then it's going to be here forever."

Bensimon traces the bikini's origins to French designers Jacques Heim and Louis Reard. Reard named the 1946 invention after the Marshall Islands' Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, a U.S. test bombing site. The bikini swimsuit was "as explosive as the atomic bomb itself," Bensimon writes, also pointing out that the bikini "could only have been invented by a man."

"It was a very conservative time," Bensimon says in an interview. "Obviously, it caused a lot of scandal."

At first, the bikini was deemed inappropriate, unseemly, Bensimon says. Proper women would not wear one. After all, it revealed the belly button.

But 15 years later, times were changing. With the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the bikini gained acceptance and clout.

"To bare flesh was to be politically subversive and culturally enlightened," wrote Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker in the book Making Waves: Swimsuits and the Undressing of America.

Before long, the bikini became mainstream, with wholesome actress Annette Funicello wearing one that revealed her belly button in the movie How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.

"Even then, if you think about it, it was a sanitized form of beach blanket movies," says Cynthia Lewis, an English professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and co-author of Bikini Is a State of Mind. "Sandra Dee and Annette Funicello looked really virtuous in those bikinis, not at all loose or exhibitionist."

In 1964, Sports Illustrated launched its inaugural swimsuit issue, featuring a model in a white bikini. Bensimon thinks that the magazine legitimized the bikini.

Even so, it was controversial.

Sunny Bippus of West Palm Beach posed in a bikini for the third swimsuit issue cover in 1966 and remembers receiving letters from priests admonishing her for revealing her body.

She also received fan mail, such as a marriage proposal from a man who lived in the country and offered to chop wood for her.

Everyone suits up

Bikinis were not reserved for models and actresses.

Gloria Yousha of Winter Park remembers wearing her first bikini to Coney Island's Brighton Beach in the 1960s.

"I felt pretty good about myself," Yousha recalls.

"I didn't have any taboos about my body. I was young."

Ellen Winston, 61, can hardly remember a time before she wore bikinis.

"It was a part of you, that was your signature," says Winston, of Orlando, a former manager of an Everything But Water bathing-suit store.

" . . . There was a great freedom to put this on and sun-tan everywhere and just feel good."

Of course, for some women, bikinis can represent negative feelings toward their bodies. Some dread shopping for them, particularly because many styles today have become more revealing and smaller.

"Smaller?" says Bippus, 66, the former Sports Illustrated model. "They're nonexistent!"

Case in point: The cover of this year's SI swimsuit issue features eight women wearing white bikini bottoms -- and nothing else.

Bippus, who now owns an interior-design firm in West Palm Beach, wore bikinis for many years, but stopped at age 55.

"When you get to be my age, you really shouldn't be doing that,'' Bippus says. "I know they do in Europe. I don't think it's very appealing."

Enjoy the skin you're in

Many women disagree.

Lewis, the English professor, wrote her book with a group of friends in their 50s who still wear bikinis. They call themselves The Bikini Team.

"The real key here is feeling comfortable about who you are in the skin you're in, not worrying what other people may be thinking about you," Lewis says.

She says she feels more comfortable in a bikini now than she did in her 20s.

"You don't have to shrivel up into a ball and hide yourself as you go into middle age. You can still look mighty good and have a good time."

Mimi Munro, an Ormond Beach grandmother, still wears bikinis.

"I prefer a two-piece," says Munro, 54, a champion surfer and massage therapist. "It feels freer."

Winston says one-piece suits "would wreck my tan line."

"Should I be approaching 62 and Social Security and be wearing a bikini?" Winston asks. "Oh, yes."



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