Thank You, France!

You can say what you want to about the French, but they have given us two great gifts. One of which I have never seen in person and the other I never see enough of. The first being the Statue Of Liberty, I have never seen it in person - but a great gift to the USA. The second was and is a great gift to all humanity, and I never see enough of it, or should I say them. It was on this date in 1946 the French gave us the BIKINI!!! Wooohoo!

According to Wikipedia: the modern bikini was introduced by French engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim in Paris in 1946. Réard was a car engineer, but by 1946 he was running his mother's lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergères in Paris. Heim was working on a new kind of beach costume. It comprised two pieces, the bottom large enough to cover its wearer's navel. In 1946, he advertised the bathing suit, known as the "Atome," as the world's "smallest bathing suit".^[21] Réard named his swimsuit the "bikini", taking the name from the Bikini Atoll, one of a series of islands in the South Pacific where testing on the new atomic bomb was occurring that summer. Historians assume Reard termed his swimsuit the "bikini" because he believed its revealing style would create reactions among people similar to those created by America’s atomic bomb in Japan just one summer earlier. Réard sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised it as "smaller than the smallest swimsuit". Réard could not find a model to wear his design. He ended up hiring Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris. That bikini, a string bikini with a g-string back of 30 square inches (194 cm²) of cloth with newspaper type printed across, was introduced on July 5 at Piscine Molitor, a public pool in Paris. Heim's design was the first worn on the beach, but clothing was given its name by Réard.