Page 10 - Leisure Living Magazine July 2018

It’s Bikini Season!
By Patricia Wynn Brown
You remember the days when we could actually breathe while wearing a bikini, all the while also eating a sky-blue popsicle, a hot dog, and a Coke- with no fear of an ounce of weight gain. For me and many boomers, that moment of exhalation and indulgence is gone with the wind, and for most, so are the bikinis.
We might need to text Louis Reard for an update. He is the former engineer turned design- er who invented the bikini that made its debut July 5, 1946 in Paris. (But no, we actually need to talk to him graveside as he died in 1984.)
The bikini got its name from the brilliant branding allusion to the site in the Marshall Islands where they did the nuclear weapons test- ing, so named Bikini Atoll. Reard had a skywrit- ing plane spell out, “BIKINI, SMALLER THAN ANY BATHING SUIT IN THE WORLD!” So the idea was that everyone would be so excited about this new ooh la la development that it would cause an atomic explosion.
Reard was right.
As none of the “good girl” models in Paris would wear such a scandalous bit of swimwear, a heroine stepped forward from the chorus
The Wynn kids at Lake Erie in the 1950’s. The Bikini speaks for itself.
line of the Casino de Paris exotic dancing girls, one Michelene Bernardin, to model the risqué teeny- weeny swim suit. Mademoiselle Bernardin promptly received 50,000 fan letters.
It took a while for the U.S. to accept the sexy swimwear, but not so with my Grandma. My grandmother, Agnes Mitchell Wynn, an artist and champion archer and croquet player, also she made her own clothes. Although she was tucked away in a little cottage on a farm in Millersport, Ohio, and was no haute couture fashion designer like Louis Reard, she decided that in about 1957, I was to swim in my underwear no more at the ripe age of six, and she would make for me what she told me was a swimsuit called a “bikini.” This was in anticipation of a family vacation to Lake Erie (where this picture was taken) .
Grandma fashioned mine from the extra fabric that previously graced her cottage kitchen window. Yes, Scarlet O’Hara and six-year-old me had a lot in common. And the only thing missing from my other direct sartorial connection, to Carol Burnett’s famous sketch, was a curtain rod.
As you can see in the picture, my sister, the Pretty One Kathleen, was deemed an innocent
10 |LeisureLiving July 2018
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