It is also the physical embodiment of architect Mies van der Rohe’s idea that less is more, perhaps even its clearest expression. Concisely, it is the bikini.
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It was a hyperbolic gesture on Reard’s part, to name what would become a 20th-century fashion icon after a place forever linked to the birth of the Cold War, but hell, it worked.
It even refigured the course of literature, latterly cinema too.
Without the bikini, Vladimir Nabokov would have no Lolita, and Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s incurable worshipper of nymphets, would have no fire in his loins.
Early on in this 1955 novel, Humbert desultorily makes his way through the Haze family home. It is here that he stumbles on Lolita, played in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie adaptation by Sue Lyons, wearing “a polka-dotted handkerchief tied around her chest”.
It was a “sun-shot moment”, to quote Humbert, the dazzle of which has drawn many a photographer to snap a pretty babe — here Carroll Baker — in that atomic age invention, the bikini. — Sean O’Toole
