Louis Réard named the bikini after an atomic atoll

On 5 July 1946, Louis Réard, an automotive engineer turned couturier, unveiled at the Molitor swimming pool in Paris a thirty-gram bathing suit and named it after an atomic atoll. Five days earlier, the United States had detonated the Able bomb at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands: it was the first peacetime nuclear test, and its name filled every newspaper in the world. Réard, a marketing man, understood that his garment needed a name just as explosive, and he registered the trademark "Bikini" on 18 July.

Micheline Bernardini, a dancer at the Casino de Paris, was the only model willing to wear it: not a single professional mannequin agreed to pose. It competed with Jacques Heim's "Atome", another Parisian who had been advertising since May as "the smallest bathing suit in the world". Réard simply outdid him: his bikini was smaller still, and the name rang louder. Heim was reduced to a footnote.

Bernardini received 50,000 fan letters in the following months. Spain, the United States and Italy banned the garment well into the 1960s, and the Catholic Church declared it sinful in 1953. In 1963, a French court ruled that the word "bikini" had entered common language: Réard lost the exclusive rights to a trademark he had planted on top of a mushroom cloud.