Louis Réard

On 5 July 1946, at the Piscine Molitor in Paris, Louis Réard (1896-1984), a French automobile engineer who ran his mother's lingerie business, introduced the two-piece swimsuit he called the bikini. He named it after Bikini Atoll, where the United States had begun atomic tests days earlier, and the name outlived his company by decades.

Louis Réard, engineer and lingerie seller

Réard was born in Lille on 10 October 1896. He trained and worked as an automobile engineer, then in about 1940 took over his mother's lingerie business near the Folies Bergere in Paris. That shop is the link between the engineer and the swimsuit: he was a lingerie retailer, not a couturier, when he made it.

The record for this page said he was born in 1897 and gave no birthplace. Wikipedia gives 10 October 1896 in Lille.

Smaller than the Atome

He was not the only Parisian working on a small two-piece that summer. The designer Jacques Heim had already launched a suit called the Atome and advertised it as the world's smallest bathing suit. Réard answered with a slogan that his was "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit." His version was a string bikini cut from about 30 square inches of fabric, printed with a newspaper pattern, and he declared that "like the bomb, the bikini is small and devastating."

A dancer from the Casino de Paris

No fashion model would wear it. Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, an 18-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, to present it at the Molitor pool. She is reported to have received 50,000 fan letters, many of them from men. (The old version of this page gave her age as 19.)

Patent number 19431

Fourteen days after the launch, Réard applied for a patent on the design and was awarded number 19431. He also set a test for what counted as a real bikini: it had to be small enough to pull through a wedding ring.

The suit met resistance. It was banned in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Australia, and the Vatican condemned it. Pope Pius XII voiced disapproval after Kiki Hakansson was crowned in a bikini at the 1951 Miss World contest. A longer list of bans and celebrity firsts on the earlier version of this entry could not be confirmed and has been dropped.

Forty years of bikinis

Réard eventually opened a bikini shop in Paris and sold swimsuits there for 40 years. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 16 September 1984, and his company folded in 1988, four years later.

The word did not need him. "Bikini" was first a registered trademark but became generic, and today it names not only the swimsuit but the low-rise bikini brief in every lingerie drawer and the bikini bottom on every beach.

Last updated October 7, 2026