{"id":5124,"date":"2026-01-09T02:19:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/?p=5124"},"modified":"2026-01-09T02:19:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T10:19:16","slug":"how-brigitte-bardot-made-the-bikini-mainstream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/?p=5124","title":{"rendered":"How Brigitte Bardot Made the Bikini Mainstream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The ballyhoo that gathered around all the naked dressing at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival<\/a> was, in hindsight, a little ironic. Yes, the red carpet that stretches along the Croisette is famed for its archaic dress code, leaving Bella Hadid<\/a>, Dakota Johnson<\/a>, et al at the mercy of prescriptivist film nerds for daring to participate in the sheer and sexy. But it was Cannes that first beamed the bikini (of all the non-black-tie-appropriate items) into the public consciousness.<\/p>\n

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\"Cannes<\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n

Brigitte Bardot in 1953.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Mirrorpix\/Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Though evidence of bikini-style bralettes can be found as early as Ancient Rome\u2014there are mosaics in the Sicilian Villa Romana del Casale depicting women exercising in two-piece garments dating back to 400AD\u2014there is still debate over who invented the modern bikini of swimsuit separates cut to the proportions of lingerie. (Both the couturier Jacques Heim and mechanical engineer Louis R\u00e9ard claim to have been the first to have launched the silhouette on the French Riviera during the summer of 1946.) But regardless of who created it first\u2014for what it\u2019s worth, R\u00e9ard owned the actual patent\u2014there are some styles that can only be born from a specific moment in time. This one being of post-war emancipation, when the convergent forces of wanting to achieve a sun tan and wanting to show some skin became newly acceptable among socially progressive young people.<\/p>\n

It took a while for the bikini to pick up outside of the more laissez-faire environs of southern France\u2014the 1934 navel-banning Hays Code prohibited the design from being shown on screen in America and Pope Pius XII decreed it as sinful, while countries including Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain issued state-wide bans\u2014which is where the Cannes Film Festival (and Brigitte Bardot<\/a>, who has sadly passed away at 91<\/a>) comes in.<\/p>\n

The year was 1953, and the then-18-year-old Bardot provoked a moment of global brouhaha when she posed for photos on the beach while wearing a tropical-print bikini. Sailors lined the boardwalk to catch a glimpse of the actress, while one woman sunbathing in a coat, tights, and an ankle-length skirt watched on in slack-jawed confusion. For those who hadn\u2019t seen the 1952 film titled Marina, the Girl in the Bikini<\/em>, in which Bardot plays Marina, the girl in the bikini, it would have been considered a gross and indecent act of exhibitionism\u2014albeit a titillating one for all those lovesick naval officers, I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n

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\"Thalians<\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n

Natalie Wood stands on the shoulders of Steve Rowland at the Beach Ball in Malibu in 1956.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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\"Image<\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n

Corinne Fontaine during the 16th Cannes Film Festival in 1963.<\/p>\n

<\/span>PAUL LOUIS\/Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

It was all part of a genius game plan to promote that same movie, during which\u00a0Bardot had her photograph taken on every single beach in the south of France. But it could just as feasibly have been a tacit project to promote the Cannes Film Festival itself\u2014the aftershock of those photos was likened to an explosion of the highest magnitude, with Diana Vreeland<\/a> describing the bikini as \u201cthe most important thing since the atom bomb\u201d (the design was quite literally named after a nuclear test site in the western Pacific called the Bikini Atoll). It was broadly thanks to Bardot that the swimsuit became mainstream throughout the \u201950s, the sexual upswing of the \u201960s, and beyond. Similar photos would later be taken of Anita Ekberg<\/a> and Sophia Loren<\/a> while attending Cannes, with the whole beach babe thing becoming something of a tradition for Hollywood stars visiting the Riviera in the mid-21st century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ballyhoo that gathered around all the naked dressing at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrity-style"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markcomedia.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}