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Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories, little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV, movies, music, and more. And I think today, for only the second time, maybe after the Sonic episode, we are looking at a non movie music TV piece of pop culture, although it might have virtually any entry in those mediums, cannon beat for the sheer scope of its influence.
That's right, folks, In honor of the official.
Start of summer, we are talking about bikinis.
Jordan. I feel like this point of.
Those show is usually where we talk about our personal history with bikinis, and unless there's something I really don't know about you, we might be ad a little bit out of our depth here. I'm trying to keep this as little like leering and creepy as possible. I'm really cognitive off is like the old guy at the Nude beach here. So I will say though that the kind of fifties sixties like beach blanket bingo era of pop culture bikini influence is probably up your alley.
Right.
Oh yeah, no, I really appreciate you adding a dose of kitchen into this episode. I'm really excited to get to the California myth and I'll keep my.
Mic love references to a minimum, but.
There will be Yeah, a lot, a lot of beach boys talking this episode that I'm excited about. But yeah, I mean, you're right. This is the part of the show where we talk about our personal experience with a given topic. But in this case, you're right. Our experience is fairly limited, and mine's fairly limited outside of Frankie in Anette movies. But yeah, now that it's after Memorial Day, it's the unofficial start of summer, I thought this could be definitely a fun tangent to go down.
Yeah.
So you know, I'm not particularly well versed in the history of fashion or anything, but I do remember having that Raquel Welch in One Million Year's BC poster burned into my skull like the hot Metal talisman gets burned into the Nazis hand in the first Dadiana Jones first time I.
Saw a classic, Yeah, wait, where did you see this?
I feel like Spencer's Gifts in the Capital City, in the Capital City Mall in camp Hill, Pa. Baby, So much of my formative experience was done like timidly venturing into the hot topic and Spencer's gifts, and just like surreptitiously taking notes on the stuff that I saw there that I thought was transgressive.
I mean, and this is interesting because that so many of the things that I learned about as a kid were from like Old Time Life, nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties coffee table books, which is why I saw a poster for the first time too. I think this says a lot about.
Each of us so folks, from the weird influence of the atomic bomb on this particular style of swimwear, to how backyard pool culture fueled the boom, to what Emily Post said about the bikini.
Here's everything you didn't know about bikinis.
Wow.
Starting off, the bikini is not actually the first two piece swimwear and design. Yes, while the Romans did a great many things in the buff, including swim there are murals that show Roman women wearing wood is basically a bikini like a rap style bandou bra and briefs. But they also have great, many artistic depictions of everybody being
naked in bathhouses. Nudity was much less prohibited when you were playing around in the water for centuries because swimming was limited to people who lived there.
You were not.
That's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought about. What did They have a lot of pools in major cities though too. But I guess if you're just in some kind of agricultural community, Yeah, yeah.
You're not taking the oxen and cart and family down to the beach for a day because half of you would.
Die down the shore.
Yeah, there's no down the shore in Rome. But yeah, it's interesting that this prudishness around swimming is not part of ancient society because they have all of this rich mythology of like water related gods and nymphs and so on and so forth. So like you don't really see this prudishness around public bathing start to take root basically until the Middle Ages.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I mean, there are paintings in mosaics dating back to five thousand, six hundred BC in the ancient settlement of Ittalia Hook I'll just pretend that's the right way to say that it's in present day Turkey, and it shows their goddesses wearing two piece swimming style outfits and they're surviving Minoan paintings from sixteen hundred BC that show similar swimsuits that look like something out of a Frankie in a net movie.
Basically, it's really strange how that style.
It's something that you see in paintings and mosaics that are thousands of years old. And there's also an ancient Sicilian villa from roughly two hundred and fifty a d so, you know, almost two thousand years ago, which features a mosaic of women playing sports wearing what we're called subligar and strophium, which acted as bottom and top coverings respectively.
So yes, this has quite the history, but it was the medieval period that really made a change here, probably due to the fact that this is the classic era of hand drawn maps with weird beasts on them that just said, here be monsters. So like, you know, if that's your mass media, you're probably a little bit scared off of deep water.
It was also I think i'll result of the Black Plague too, that was bathing and swimming were thoughts to spread disease. So this was definitely a dark age not only for knowledge but for swimming attire because it wasn't really needed because people weren't swimming that much the real tragedy of the Dark Ages.
Yeah, and this starts to change in the seventeen hundreds when it becomes considered healthy and beneficial to just kind of sort of submerge yourself in the oceans or hot springs. They didn't really have like a concept of swimming as like a dedicated healthy athletic activity. They were just like just go in it, sort of yeah, be in it, it'll be good for you.
Yeah, there's the baths in Saratoga, there's the baths in Bath, England, the Minna. There are a lot of these these kind of health spas cropping up all over the world.
Like yeah, yeah, you said you just sort of.
Like taking what was the expression, taking the waters? Taking the waters?
Yes, yes, And in fact it would take one of our nation's horniest founding fathers, Benson and Franklin, huge proponent of swimming and at one point contemplated setting up a school for it in London.
I'm guessing because as you said, he was a randy old man who was rumored to have died of syphilis.
But you know, the swimwear around this time, if you can even call it, that was just it's some of these photos are ridiculous. Makes me lament not for the first time that there isn't an audio or a visual component to this podcast, because these are hilarious. It's just like these huge shifts like moo moos, but they're made from.
Like woola material I could imagine.
Yeah, And they would weigh the hem downs to keep them from floating up.
Oh yeah, I mean they would stick actual like lead weights and sow them into the bottom. And as you mentioned, these swimming garments were heavy. I mean they weighed over twenty pounds and as a result, up until like the twentieth century, women traditionally swam and I say that in quotes by holding onto a rope attached to a buoy, because with their swim outfits were so heavy that they would just sink like a stone.
There's this other thing called swimming machines that I thought were really interesting, which are these like they look like sheds, like suburban gardening sheds that you would keep the mower or the wheelbarro room. They're on wheels and they just roll them into the ocean and women go into them and kind of cavort around inside of them. Then they get wheeled back out of the ocean.
Those were old.
Those were invented by quankers in like the seventeen fifties, and they had this hole that you would jump through into the ocean. And they called this hole a modesty tunnel, which.
Oh, modesty tunnel.
That takes me back to my weekend in Acapulco, Hell, the eighteen hundred. It's big century for swimmers. You see railroads in the eighteen twenties, I believe, and other advances in personal transportation mean that people can now go down the shore or to the lake or what have you. It's just people are more mobile on a bit your scale. And then this is where you start to see the bloomer suits, which are the big puffy skirts over the big puffy pants. Again, just so much, so much fabric.
How did people not drown in these?
I know? It's really wild.
Swimming in a parachute, yes, the parachute pants even it's like the EMC hammer pans. There were laws passed at the turn of the century that required all women in bathing suits to wear stockings, which was kind of a double blind because women were also not allowed to wear pants. But then around the turn of the nineteenth century, swimming becomes both an intercollegiate and Olympic sport, which kind of drives up its popularity, and a decade or so after that,
there's this really interesting figure. She's an Australian swimmer named Annette Kellerman, and she created and successfully markets her own swimsuit that's based on kind of the what I would describe as the old timey wrestler like this Andre the giant singlet sort of thing that men were wearing, just like a tank top merged with shorts. I guess is that technically also a row I don't know.
The version I saw had full sleeves that went down your wrists and leggings that went down to her feet.
But because it was form fitting, she was arrested for wearing it on a Massachusetts beach in nineteen oh seven and charged with indecent exposure, despite the fact that she wasn't exposed outside of her hands and head, and this became a fairly high profile legal case at the time, which she ultimately won, setting the precedent for women's swimwear that actually lent itself to swimming and not just like trying not to sing.
Swimming bags. Yeah. Yeah, Net Kellerman is such a fascinating person.
Yeah, she wore leg brace as a child when she was growing up in Australia, and she took up swimming to strengthen them. Became one of the first women to train swim the English Channel at the age of just nineteen, and she wrote a book about swimming. She helped popularize synchronized swimming as a sport. And she was even the first woman to appear nude in a Hollywood film, which is nineteen Sixteen's a Daughter of the Gods. She's got kind of the venus on the shell situation.
This movie was reportedly the first million dollar film ever produced. But like so many early films, no copies are known to exist and it's now considered lost. Isn't there like a huge amount of those films that are lost. Oh yeah, I mean a lot of it was between the film just degrading and just fires and stuff just straight up not being kept because people didn't really have much of
an eye towards saving things for posterity at this time. Yeah, there's a lot of his all Wikipedia entry un lost films of you know, historical significance, and that's a big one.
Yeh. Bummer.
But despite Net's efforts, women were still subject to weird laws around bathing suits. There are photos out there of actual swimsuit police going around on the beach with like a whistle and a badge and a ruler measuring the length of these women's suits to make sure that they were in order.
But women were not the only ones subject to draconian, puritanical laws about swimwear. In most states, it was illegal for men to be topless until nineteen thirty seven, and lawmakers in Atlantic City hell out even longer, saying that they didn't want And this is a quote, gorillas on our beaches.
That's got to be racist. I assume that's a deeply racist sentiment.
It's offensive on multiple levels.
Yeah, as with most things, we have Smut to thank for knocking down boundaries. Burlesque, which is I believe, one of like two native art forms that are actually native to the to the Americas.
It's like jazz and the blues and burlesque.
Really, I would have assumed that was like French Vaudeville. I could see being Oh, I guess that's musical, because yeah, Vaudeville has.
Its roots of music hall. Burlesque I believe is a holy American invention, Jamie, can we get a fact check on that?
Number one, of course, jazz and burlesque. I mean, I'm happy to assume that those are the two only American art forms exactly like you know, fast food. Yeah, it makes it's all scans.
Yeah, so burlesque, obviously they're in to some degree of nudity, but vaudeville performers too, like you know, Harry Houdini around this time was pretty frequently seen shirtless because he was submerged in water and heavy chains and all that. And then there's a nineteen twenty nine film Man with a movie camera that showed women topless and in two piece bathing suits that would expose their mid drifts.
This isn't strictly about bikinis. But there's this great story about the New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, from whom you know, LaGuardia Airport takes its name, and there's a musical about him, very famous New York mayor. He supposedly, I mean, this is kind of apocryphal, jump started the development of the thong in nineteen thirty nine because the city was hosting the World's Fair at the time, and he wanted New York's dancers and striptease artists to be slightly more clothed.
And the result of this sort of mayorial edict was to develop the thong good for LaGuardia.
So moving into the nineteen thirties, there are a couple of things that happened. There are advances in fabric technology. We've got DuPont to think for that. I believe who invented nylon palm.
That might have been dal, that might have been Dow.
Actually, the two sides of American culture nudity and horrific violence. So you basically stop making bathing suits out of like heavy flannel and cotton and then all this other stuff, and two men stop covering up their chests while they're swimming or competing in sports, which helps us normalize increasing levels of nudity on the national stage. It's interesting because the other big development that happens around this time, and I see Coco Chanell's name attached to this, is making
tans fashionable. You know, previously, the reason that you have all of these alabaster women and portrayals of antiquity was because if you had tanem and you were outside laboring like a disgusting peasant.
And therefore if you were pure.
White as the driven snow, it meant you were inside at all times, and therefore of a higher financial cast. And that's even why people would powder their face and powder their wigs, trying to look as pale and as untouched by the sun as possible. But that starts to change. And so one of the ways in which you showed that you had money now was by traveling and by
going on holiday. And this is where we get the backless swimsuit, because the backless swimsuit exposed an even greater swath of your you know, tanned, tanned skin, and so that's one of the first shots across the bow of increased swimsuit skimpiness. And so in nineteen thirty two you have a French designer named Madeleine Vione who designed evening gown with an exposed mid drift. And obviously we owe a huge debt to Busby Berkeley.
And those films.
The nineteen thirty two One Foot Light Parade showed bikinis, as did Dorothy Lemore's The Hurricane in nineteen thirty seven. But this is all pre Hayze code so Jordan talked to us a little bit about the Haze Code, and the Hayes Code was put.
In place, I believe in the late or mid thirties to the mid fifties, and it was kind of like the Ten Commandments of filmmaking, like things that you were not allowed to show, and they were very strict and usually pretty ridiculous. I mean, I don't think this is strictly tied to the Hayes Code, but the kind of thing where like on I Love Lucy, where Ricky and Lucy were shown in separate beds and they weren't allowed to say like pregnant and had to say expecting and
things like that. Things were very puritanical, rigid code of what you could and could not show in a film. But prior to this Hayes Code, movies from the twenties and thirties are actually in a lot of cases it's surprisingly very liberal in terms of their you know, what they showed in terms of sex and fashion and language.
It's really interesting.
The actress Dolores del Rio holds the title the first major star to wear a two piece swimsuit on screen, in the nineteen thirty three film Flying Down to Rio.
Chorus girls also chorus girls at the time are obviously sort of exempt from this rule their fashionedd bikini style outfits. But the whole thing is like navels, right, like you have to cover navels. That's the Barbara Eden thing.
Yeah, that was the thing I guess, as you said, into the sixties with Barbariden and Idri of Genie. I think Share was like the first. I think she might have been the first person on network TV to do that.
I kind of love her. God bless her. She's broken down so many barriers Share she really truly has.
So there's an American designer named Claire mccardal who brings out a side cut bathing suit in nineteen thirty five. You know, we're getting the back list, we're getting the sides cut out, so we're edging closer towards the bikini. And that's in nineteen thirty five. As I said, and Jordan, you have an interesting fact here.
Yeah, this is just something really pretty hilarious that I came across a few months before the bikini was unveiled.
In nineteen forty six, there was.
Something called the Midnight Booie and this was advertised in like Life magazine and Vogue, And it was manufactured by the Duchess Royal Company. And it was a two piece suit with a cork buckle attached across the bottom and if the wearer wanted to remove it while swimming, they could tie the top to the buckle and allow both parts to float while you splashed around swimming in the buff. And it was advertised in a December nineteen forty five
issue of Vogue. And the fact that it was advertising Life magazine is pretty crazy to me because that's such a mainstream publication. But the ad featured this priceless copy. There's google it, you can see it. The name of the suit. Of course, the Midnight booy suggests the nocturnal conditions under which nude swimming is most agreeable. So that I mean, yes, I'm filling a need in a market there with some impressive.
I want to hear the radio ads for it where they're like the Midnight Booie.
For all your nudebathing needs.
How often has this happened to you? Oh boy, We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information In just.
A moment, Jordan wrote this header. I have to get shout it out for him. The atomic bomb entered. The atomic bomb and the Frenchman one of Asop's less popular fables. So the important thing about all of these bikini precursors and all of these different, you know, burlesque outfits and all this stuff, is that they were usually pretty high cut. They concealed the belly button. More of the butt is actually concealed by them. We're not edging into g string territory.
But World War II curbs the production of fabrics across the board, and because it was needed, among other things, to make uniforms for the sick millions of men and
women who were serving sixteen million. And in nineteen forty two, the United States War Production Board issues Regulation L eighty five, which cuts the use of natural fibers and clothing and mandates a ten percent reduction in the amount of fat in women's beach where So the government literally comes in and says, your bathing suits have to be skinny, Johnny, make the bathing suit skimpia. It's gonna help us win
the wall twenty three Scando. Then, of course, we dropped the atomic bomb a humanitarian moment, not a humanitarian moment, a low point in humanity, I should say, Jordan, take us into the Frenchman.
Yes, this brings us to my favorite part of this episode, which is the arms race, really the only kind of arms race I can get behind, between two Frenchmen to create the smallest, most scandalous swimsuit the world has ever known. A very noble pursuit, especially coming after I'll just talk
about the atom bomb. There was a Frenchman named Jacques Heim who was apparently an active member of the French resistance during World War Two, and he created a two piece design that he called the Atom but it failed to catch on. But the atom is a great name for a small swimsuit because at the time that was the smallest unit of matter then known to exist. Tiny suit, tiny particle. Very clever. I just want to savor that before we start talking about bombing tropical island Paradise Is
into glassy craters. I just think I think that's cute, Adam. I think it's a much more clever name than the bikini. Oh shots fire.
So your team Heim, Yeah, technically he's the originator, so yeah.
But I mean both these guys really knew the promo game and this guy, Jacquesheim, he hired a skywriter to write the World's Smallest bathing suit is now available above a very popular Mediterranean resort. So this guy was not messing around. Well, should we talk about the design.
It's I think it probably kind of looked like the one Rachel McAdams is wearing. The notebook had like a rough old top, but the bottom of it was still high cut covered. The nabel covered most of the butt. Still too risque for women though, does not catch on.
Yes, and this guy, Jacques Heim, he was upstaged a short time later. I think it was within the same year by another Frenchman, Louis Rayard, and he's the man that we now credit as the inventor of the bikini. And Riyard was an automotive engineer who helped run his mother's lingerie shop, which I think sounds a little awkward.
But moving on.
They're French, they have more enlightened attitudes about this kind of stuff than we do.
That's true.
I just think it's interesting to note the ties between engineers and those who make women's under garments. Howard Hughes, the legendary.
Eccentric billionaire and saying legendary guy with jars of urin.
Yeah. He got his start in engineering. I mean, as everyone who saw The Aviator knows, he designed planes. But by the thirties and forties he had moved into producing films and he was unhappy with the footage that he was seeing from a movie he was making with Jane Russell called The Outlaw in nineteen forty five nineteen forty six, and he was specifically unhappy with her i'll say, appearance.
So he put on his engineering hat and he designed a cantilevered bral for his start aware and apparently he was better at designing planes than he was designing underwear, because Jane Russell described his entraption as quote uncomfortable and ridiculous. Believe me, this man could design planes, but a mister playtext he wasn't, which is an incredible SoundBite from her.
But forty spurn Yes. Anyway, back to the swimsuit arms race, Rayard was inspired when he noticed sunbathers on the Saint Tropez Beach roll up the edges of their swimsuits to achieve, you.
Know, a more full tan.
Yeah, and so he basically won up at Tim by making the design even skimpier basically created it was a string bikini. He connected all of the essential pieces of fabric with string and christened his creation the Bikini after the Bikini Atoll, where the atomic bomb testing had taken place just days earlier.
Yeah, the term bombshell was already in the popular lexicon, so Riyard hoped that his creation would shock people in the same way that the a bomb did, which I mean, I'm really curious to see what a marketing expert would say about linking the atomic bomb and an item of vacation apparel.
But uh, I mean, but.
Go with god, sex and death the two things.
Yeah, you know what American Yeah.
Debuting on July fifth, nineteen forty six, Rayard's design used only thirty inches of fabric and exposed not just the navel but much of the dairy air with the g string style design, and consequently, he could not find a model daring enough to wear it in public for the big reveal, so he used a nineteen year old exotic dancer, Michelle Bernardini as the very first model.
I love this.
She supposedly received fifty thousand letters after modeling it at a Parisian pool, and she's still alive. She turned ninety four in December and lives in Australia, and she restaged the famous bikini premiere photo forty years after the original in nineteen eighty six, when she was fifty eight years old.
Hell Yes, Rayard if nothing else, had an instinct for flair. He patterned one of the versions Bernardini would wear in newsprint, just sort of already winking at the rush of press coverage thing was going to get and I love how
horrible these people are to each other. He marketed his version as smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit in kind of a direct shot across the bow to his competitor, and declared that for a design to be considered an authentic bikini, it must be so small and had to use so little fabric that it could be pulled through a wedding ring, which is an indelible bit of Pte Barnam esque humbug.
You know that's quite a metaphor not just any ring, a wedding ring.
Yeah.
Bernardini was seen holding up a match box in the first photos of her in the suit to indicate that the bikini was so small that it could fit inside of a matchbox. And as you said, discover Yard really had a gift for showmanship, and as a promo gimmick, he commissioned the car body specialist to turn his car into a road yacht. They turned the whole body of the car into this mock luxury cabin cruiser with a
ca portholes, an anchor, a signal mass and other nautical regalia. Unfortunately, it wasn't, you know, an amphibious vehicle, so it couldn't go in water. But the car went on advertising parades with a crew of bikini clad women, which caused a splash. As it were, I mean, this is basically like the what was that the Budweiser at like the Swedish bikini team or something.
It was like that like fifty years early. Yes, needless to say, it caused a stir. The International Herald Tribune ran nine separate articles on the unveiling event alone. Spain, Italy, Australia, Portugal, France all banned it for a time, and they were prohibited in German public swimming pools until the nineteen seventies.
Wow, I love how offended Germany was by this. There was a women's magazine in Germany called the modern girl, and they wrote it is unthinkable that a decent girl with tact would ever wear.
Such a thing.
And then in nineteen fifty, American swimsuit mogul Fred Cole, the owner of mass market swimmer firm Coal of California, told Time that he had little but scorn for France's famed bikinis. I imagine that doing the Orson Wells Voice. I have little bit scorn for these so cold French bikinis. Cold California.
It's work in progress.
Coal of California also famous for being Catherine Colson, the log lady from Twin Peaks. Her aunt, Margaret Feligi, is a longtime designer for Coal of California. So eraser Head was partially funded by profits from Coal of California. So if you want to draw this connection, there's a connection between the popularity of bikinis and eraser Head. So that's pretty America, you know, David lynch Man, that's America, all right.
Keep going with these bikini quotes that we can maybe read in Orson Wells Voice.
Yeah, I mean, my favorite pearl clutching quote about bikinis is from the actress and swimmer esther Williams, who compiented that this is beautiful. A bikini is a thoughtless act period. It's just incredible. And the really insane thing to me is that there are still places in the world where
bikinis are banned. There is a city in Croatia where you can be fined for walking the streets in a swimsuit, in the Maldives where most public beaches are restricted to one pieces, and there's a city in the UAE where swimwear is banned entirely. And this is even true in places in the good old US of A. In nineteen ninety, the state of Florida banned thong bikinis from its state beaches, and in January two thousand and five, the city of Melbourne, Florida,
followed suit. If you're caught wearing a thong in Melbourne, you will owe five hundred dollars in fines and possibly sixty days in prison, though I wonder how strictly this rule is enforced on the On the flip side, there's a beach in Egypt called La Femme which prohibits men and cameras, so Muslim women can sunbathe without Oh yeah,
I think it was actually very recent that was. I think it's actually a private beach that was opened I want to sell me definitely in the two thousands, possibly hold twenty tens.
Yeah.
Umm, and the Catholic Church really had it in for bikinis at one point. The Vatican newspaper and this is coming from a book called Bikini Story by an author named Patrick alac So. I'm taking him at his word for this, but this sounds made up. There is a newspaper in the Vatican, the osservatori Romano, who wrote that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were alive and well and had taken the form of the bikini.
I mean, yeah, that papal thing. It reminds me that Lady Bruce quote, if your body's dirty, the fault.
Lies with the manufacturer.
So it's funny to me that the Vatican has its problem with the human form.
Yeah, not like anything else was happening in the priesthood throughout the twentieth century.
Umm.
And apparently at one point I was not able. This is also from Alex book. I just wanted to put this in here. It's hilarious. I wasn't able to find out which communist group, but Apparently some communist group decried bikinis as capitally decadence, and so a world turned its horny eyes to America and the topic of this heading. The heading that I used for this in the outlined
was pools rush in where angels fear to tread. But because America is a terrible place soaked in the blood of the innocent, it's impossible to discuss the rise of the bikini without the rise of.
The private pool.
So white America's spending power and wealth was at its concentrated peak following World War Two, because you have veterans coming home on the GI Bill, able to enroll in college, pick up higher paying jobs. And labor unions are at their historical strongest in America, the strongest there to be. This is the era of HOFA. This is the air before you know what. Thirty years later Reagan comes in and busts up the Air Controllers Union. Anyway, labor unions
are at their strongest peak. So money is good. There are lots of jobs to go around because the industrial economy, with cars all that good stuff, there's more money floating around in the same people that have always had money, but.
All the infrastructure is put in place to basically make the war effort happen with building planes and you know, munitions and stuff. It's basically turn on a dime and turn into making consumer goods cars like you mentioned, and appliances and things like that.
And it's important to note that public pools had actually been a big part of American urban culture until now, and they weren't I don't want to say they weren't even but they were actually desegregated until nineteen twenty.
Especially in the North.
You saw these big public pools where black people and white people were swimming together. But around nineteen twenty you start having all these morality scares and so they become segregated.
And that's what you see all these really heartrending pictures of the you know, the Jim Crow era, of all these white kids playing in pools and all these little black kids up against the fence looking in brown versus the Board of Education heavy air quotes officially end segregation in schools and fifty four and pools are not exempt
from the struggles that are around that. Three years later, in Marshall, Texas, there's an NAACP backed lawsuit where a man was suing to try and integrate a brand new swimming pool, and the judge admirably ruled in his favor, at which point the citizens of Marshall voted seventeen hundred and fifty eight to eighty nine to have the city sell off the entirety of their recreational facilities rather than integrate them. Let's burn it to the ground. Though they
didn't burn it to the ground. It went into private hands, but they literally said let's sell everything rather than integrate it. So the pool went to a local Lions club, which subsequently and predictably opened it up as a white's only private facility.
This country is garbage.
So by the mid fifties, what you get is a lot of newly cash flush and mobile because cars mobile, white families fleeing from urban centers. The Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen fifty six low cost mortgages to the GI bill, and redlining, the racist practice of redlining, whereby you know, certain areas were circled in red on federally and internationally distributed maps that meant it was more desirable to loan to people here and basically ensured that black
people couldn't get loans for homes. So that's how you get the suburbs. People are fleeing urban centers. They're terrified of segregation, they're spreading out. There's all this new housing being built up. And then we get the rise of the backyard pool culture. Think of your swinging cocktail parties, you know, your John cheever on, we of the suburbs type, mixing a picture of Martini's and beating your kids with a belt and putting on some bing Crosby and.
Beating your kid with a barbecue di spatch, Like.
Yeah, yeah, if you beat your kid with a saca sweet Valencia oranges, it won't make a bruise. I think that's a family guy joke. So I don't know how much of a joke it actually was, but yeah, yeah, So this is all you have to keep this in mind that there's the better technology, better construction, and cheaper materials. So from nineteen fifty to two thousand, the number of private pools in the US goes from twenty five hundred to more than four million.
Wow.
This historian named Jeff Wiltsee writ in a two thousand and seven book called Contested Waters, A Social History of swimming Pools in America. All of this is to say that you no longer have to bear your body at a beach, lake or pond. Now you can do it in your own backyard. And then the boob tube and the boob screen and the boob page and the.
Boob radio hedge.
The French continue their campaign of horninas on the big screen in the nineteen fifties. One of the big ground zeros of the bikini on screen is in nineteen fifty two when a seventeen year old Brigitte Bordeaux stars in the French film Manina the Girl in the Bikini. Little
on the nose there, folks, but that's fine. And then there's famous pictures of her apperion it Can the following year in a Flora bikini, and then in nineteen fifty six she appears in bikini again in the film and God Created Women Woman.
Yeah.
This really went a long way into giving the bikini sort of an air of sophistication and class and not something that you know, burlesque.
Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah.
And then you start seeing the class of Hollywood pin ups like a Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable. You start seeing them in bikinis in promo shots.
And in the early sixties Emily Post the matron of manners.
Who what I mean?
Did she write books or have of a newspaper column. I can't remember which, but I mean she was famously like she was the person you looked to when you wanted to know, like you know, how to set a table properly, and how to you know all these really specific rules.
Of social decorum. She was like the queen of that. I hate this era of American Oh my god, the good thing it's it's awful. I mean, it's horrifying.
She declared the bikini for perfect figures only and only for the very but.
The rise of the Bikini was truly a full court cross medium press. By nineteen sixty, Brian Hyland hits the charts, hits number one with a bullet with one of my least favorite songs of all time, a song I truly detest with every single vibrating atom of my being. The itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot Bikini hits number one on Billboard, although not the first version. A Swedish artist named Lil Bobs Sure cut the first version in nineteen fifty six. Jordan, what do you have to say
about this song? I have nothing but terrible things to say about the song. I can't believe that hit number one. I mean, this isn't like the real novelty song era.
Yeah, this was Hello Mother, Hello Fodder Camp Grenada came out around now.
I feel like, yeah, this is a low.
Ebb before the Beatles came and rescued us all from novelty numbers. Ah.
There it is nineteen sixty two, Big year for the bikini. Playboy first features a bikini on its cover in nineteen sixty two, and also to the big screen. Ursula Andres strolls out of the ocean and into immortality when she appears as the first bond Girl honey Rider in nineteen sixty Two's Doctor No in that white bikini. It's a belted white bikini. She's got the skin diver's knife on it. Subsequently becomes known as the Doctor No bikini. And Andres
she has better feelings about this than Raquel Welch. I'll say, and just said that she owed her career to that white bikini. And she remarked this bikini has made me into a success. As a result of starring in Doctor No as the first bond girl, I was given the freedom to take my pick of future roles and to become financially independent, which bravo. It's sold for a ritzy sixty thousand dollars at a Christie's auction in two thousand
and one. Also in nineteen sixty two, we have Sue lyons we're in a bikini in Lolita, but we are not going to go there. The other thing that's important to keep in mind in this time in American culture is that the big development in mid century American life is the rise of the teen Before industrialization and sort of concentrated urban living and jobs and factories and all this, the concept of being a teenager was not It did
not really exist. As soon as you were old enough to help work on the farm or help work out the business, that's what you did, and then you got married, begat more laborers, and then you died from brucellosis at the age of forty, as God intended. So there's no there was no this notion of this transitory phase where you're not quite a kid, but you're not quite an adult. Not really as much of a thing, but changing societal mores, including you know, educational laws that keep kids in school longer,
increased cash trickling down to them. You know, parents are cash flush, so kids get an allowance, so they get spending power, which of course is political power in the country.
So there are all of a sudden the market force.
So not only teenagers are a sudden distinct demographic, but now there's money to be made in catering to them. And I know this is a bit more of a point of expertise for you than it is me. So Jordan, take it away that there.
Are artists that were traditionally seen as for young people dating back. I mean, I'm sure to you know, the beginning of time, but I mean you got your your Frank Sinatra's and the Bobby Soxxers, and the fortieses a big band artists like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, all those kinds of people. But here, really in the late fifties and early sixties, you have the rise of sort of the teen idols. You have shows
like American Bandstand and this whole rush of teen movies. Specifically, we mentioned this at the top of the episode, the sort of the whole beach Party phenomenon, starring specifically Frankie Avalon, who was a singer at the time. He had a big hit in I think nineteen sixty or sixty one with Venus and a net Funicello and a net Funicelle.
Is really interesting.
Because she was she was in Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, and so she was a kid that all the kids of the fifties grew up with, and so she was somebody who I'm trying to think of who our equivalent would be now, I mean somebody that, like you knew as like a child star that then kind of grew up so she had a real be.
Like Hannah Montana, Right, Yeah, that's good. That's a good example.
I mean, somebody that really like had a really special place in the heart of the baby boomer kids at this time because they all kind of grew up together. So if Frankie Avalon and at Fudaicello are kind of the king and queen of these Beach Party movies, they
star in the vast majority of them. The studio that's mainly responsible for making the kind of the official canon one is called American International pictures and there's seven of them, but there's all sorts of like off market ones as well, and they all have hilarious names like you know, doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and how to Stuff a Wild Bikini. I think they almost all have bikini in the name.
And yeah, and this is.
The part of the episode where Shuhorn in a whole bit about the southern California myth popularized in the early sixties by not only these beach party movies, but then you get the songs to the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, where if you were a kid in the Midwest and you were existing on a diet of like, you know, whatever was being fed to you as sort of stuff for teens movies and music, you would have this concent of California being a place where all the
guys were basically walking surfboards and all the women were blondes and bikinis and everybody was eating burgers and cherry cokes and drove around in convertibles and surfed all day and essentially it's the popular face of teenage consumerism. To get it back to the you know, the point of this episode of Bikinis, there was a movie.
It wasn't one of the sort of the.
Main beach party movies, but there was one called for those who think young and not. Sort of the ethos of all these movies. They say that probably more than.
Any singular pop cultural phenomenon.
These beach party movies probably made the bikini more acceptable to the mainstream. If the Hollywood starlets took it out of the realm of the burlesque, these beach party movies made it something that acceptable for kids, and it wasn't something that felt very adult and very like inappropriate. Suddenly it was something that felt a lot more fun, although
Disney didn't think so. I guess Disney had very strict rules about what because of net Funacello again was signed to Disney for her time in The Mickey Mouse Club.
She had very specific.
Rules about what kind of bikini she was allowed to wear, because Old Walt held her to her morals clause in her Disney contract.
But yeah, and it's fine.
I mean, you get the whole notion too, Like in this whole area and era, you know, the Beatles are coming over and sort of pushing the envelope where they can with the hair, and you know it is the whole period that every hagiographic concept of the of the sixties will drill into your head, which is.
That societal mores were changing, but you know they were.
And that brings us to the most iconic bikini of the nineteen sixties. Some people might argue with me, those people are wrong. Were quel In Welch that deer skin bikini from one million years BC and the poster of her It's one of the most defining images of the nineteen sixties. No less an authority than The New York Times described Welch in the film as a marvelous, breathing monument to womankind. I could not find out who wrote that.
I don't think it was Pauline Kale. That costume was not so much sewn as it was sculpted.
Well.
She said that the costumer for the film, Carl Toms, just draped her in deer skin and sort of cut around with scissors. I probably shouldn't be leering at this too too much, because she had. She did say in twenty twelve that she never wanted to wear it, and so much to the point where she turned down half a mill to be in another one of these movies
and classic Hollywood. They didn't let her keep it. They just realtered it, presumably again with scissors, to be reused in a movie two years later called Eve.
That makes me really sad for a bunch of reasons. One that she really hated doing it, and that makes me sad, And I'm also really sad that they tampered with this iconic bit of movie history. I feel like every episode we do the Harrison Ford Indiana Jones it belongs to a museum. But I mean, for real, though, My favorite little tangent about one million years BC and the whole sort of press scrum around it, was that one of the promo photos featured Verkel Welch in the fur outfit.
On a crucifix.
Have you ever seen this picture?
That is wild? Yeah.
They should not have done that, No, I mean predicably. This photo was not released at the time. It was actually hidden for thirty years, and it was taken by the legendary photographer Terry O'Neil, who explained this unorthodox tableau. He said, I wanted to symbolize the dilemma facing Welsh as the female sex symbol of the decade, crucified for her sexuality by the movie industry and the wider public
who did not take her seriously as an actress. And something I think also interesting, the photo is apparently framed in a.
Spot of honor at Chloe Kardashian's house.
And having said all that, we'll be right back with more too much information right after this. Other famous bikinis on screen Gloria Hendry in Live and Let Die in nineteen seventy three. She gets an honorable mention because even if the design of the bikini in the film wasn't especially notable, she was the first black bond girl. Also from that same year, Pam Greer in Coffee. She's wearing
a white bikini poolside, and that pretty much. She had been in a bunch of lower tier exploitation films prior to that, but Coffee is really what launches her into the zeitgeist, along with Foxy Brown. Yeah, pamgrea rules, I didn't know this. Jacqueline Smith caused some controversy because one of the nineteen seventy six promotional photos that went out for Charlie's Angels her other fair Faucet.
And the other one.
Thousand and aven well whatever the other one, they were fully clothed and Jacqueline Smith is wearing a white bikini standing next to them. But that thunder God stole and right quick, because Farah Faust jumps into her red one piece to promote the show, and probably the second best selling poster in the history of cheesecake posters is launched.
Well what we got next?
We got oh Phoebe Kate's coming Out of the Pool in nineteen eighty twos Fast Times at Ridgemont High the car's song moving in stereo obviously an all time moment for the film.
Kate's this is kind of complicated.
She has good memories of making this film, but she had done a film just before this called Paradise, which had also nudity in it, from her at just seventeen, and she did not feel very good about doing that film because I guess it was like a darker, more drama thing. So this one felt like more lighthearted into comparison. But you know, she did end up retiring in the nineties, and so I feel it feels gross, is all I'll say. Full stop.
She comes to a very quite an interesting show of his family. I think her dad created the sixty four thousand dollars question.
One year after Fast Times, we get Carrie Fisher in the what has passed into the lexicon as slave layout, which is a little unfortunate in return of the Jedi, the metal bikini and the maroon skirt situation designed by Aggie Gerrard Rogers, who has done a ton of stuff, American graffiti, The Conversation One flew Over, The Cuckoo's Nest, Cocoon, Pee's Big Venture, the Color Purple, the Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice, the Fugitive, Mister Holland's opis the rain Maker, the holy Man?
Why did you end with the holy Man's ay Murphy movie?
It is, yeah, I think I put that in as a punchline after all of this other iconic stuff that they've done.
So they were working at Island.
Was where that that gout design which is course Industrial Light Magic, George Lucas's SFX company. This was done from sketches by Nilo Rodis Jammero Yamero.
Fisher had to wear.
An actual bronze one of the thing for still shots, but there were other versions of it made and plastic and rubber for when she has to move with her characteristic rapier wit. She said of the bikini. If you stood behind me, you could see straight to Florida. You'll have to ask Boba Fette about that. And then she also called it what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh level of hell.
I don't like this. I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking that it just felt wrong that she was forced just the Kirr character, was forced to wear that by this big creepy blob. And now as an older person, I mean, I don't know enough about Star Wars to speak to this with any level of expertise, but it sounds like George Lucas was kind of a creep when it came to Kerrie Fisher.
Yeah, I know, sure.
She roasted him at his AFI tribute and she mentioned sort of stuff like you just said about this unpleasant experience wearing this thing, and it seemed like there was like everyone laughed, but it seemed like there was genuine anger there. And she's often told the story about how when she showed up on the set for the first time in her Princess Leiah outfit, like the white wrap thing, and he took one look at her and said, you're wearing underwear.
You're gonna have to take that off, and she said why and.
George said with the most conviction that she said made her laugh because there's no underwear in space.
It's just an insane thing to say.
And they also had that cameo in Hooked Together where they played that couple kissing on the bridge who get sprinkled with fairy ghost and then float away.
So I'm really confused about that relationship.
If it was like playful or if it was there was a creepy edge to it, I don't know.
So I I you know, I did looked at way too many listicals that were like the most iconic swimsuits in film and television, and.
I probably wrote some of those for VH. Yeah, oh same.
I feel like the rest of the eighties is kind of overlooked, but you know, the big ones that always pop up again is the high cut one piece that
Pamela Anderson primarily but also Carmen Electra on Bay. And then once we get into the nineties, I don't like getting into this hole, like this actress past the age of thirty looks amazing in a bikini, but Angela Bassett's pink bikini and how Stella got her groove back in nineteen ninety eight is one of the ones that's most frequently mentioned in that That movie, I guess is something of a groundbreaking one for it's like that and the graduate for advancing the cougar narrative.
I guess, Oh.
I just forgetting American Pie.
But okay, oh yeah, duh, American Pie was what two years later ninety nine? Okay, And I just like the one that Tara Reid wears in Big Lebowski as Bunny Glebowski. The Green One. Halle Berry deserves.
An honorable mention.
Yeah, for wearing an updated version of the ursula andres bikini, this time in an orange which is probably the only thing anyone remembers from Die Another Day in two thousand and two. I have stopped caring about this segment the cast of spring Breakers. I don't know, it's interesting because there's a longer conversation to be had for a different podcast. But I kind of assume like the notion of like an iconic piece of swimmer in media kind of starts to fall off with social media, you know.
Or the Internet, I don't know where.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
You stop having to like people stop talking about like oh, you gotta see like we're Cole Wilch in this movie. Once it was just like I can just open my phone and be flooded with every conceivable perversion that it could I could ever dream for. But there's one last bit of swimwear ef Eemera in the Monoculture. And now we're getting into a segment that I like to call what we talk about when we talk about Thong song. You can't get to Thong song without going through that thing.
Itsy bitsy song to the first big novelty hit with bikini in the title, probably the biggest Beach Boys California.
Girls one, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.
I just want to bring up the Cramps, who have a song called Bikini Girls with Machine Guns because Cramp's rule bikini Kill is also coming up through the nineties. Their name was inspired by a nineteen sixty seven B movie called The Million Eyes of Sumuru.
Starring Frankie Avalon. Baby.
It all comes full circle, But I would argue that the high water mark pun fully intended for the Bikini's impact on music is Cisco's Deathless Jam Thong Song. There is no definite article on there, despite what millions of people have Mandala effected themselves into thinking it is just thong song. Full stop, there's nova damn it one of the all time songs of the summer, despite the fact that it came out in February of two thousand, right in time for spring break. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So
a little quick bits about that song. Songwriters Desmond Child and an ex member of Minudo Draco Rosa. They got a songwriting credit because of the interpolation of living Leavita Loco. So just when Cisco says she's living Avida Loka, they get a cut of the thong song now, which is that's work smart, not hard baby. So in the original beat that was sent to Cisco, the strings were sampled
from West Montgomery's cover of eleanor Rigby. Wes Montgoverery and one of the greatest jazz guitars of all time, famously super crossed over by doing a bunch of Beatles covers, which I think is some of them were very good if they're not like truly straight ahead jazz.
But yeah, the strings from.
His version of eleanor Rigby were in the original beat of this song, and Cisco says that he knew that that would be a problem, So he tweaked the string arrangement, and he claims in an oral history done for def Jam that he pulled in some of the string musicians who were also currently playing on the soundtrack for Star Wars The Phantom.
Menace Unified Theory of nineteen ninety nine.
Yeah, exactly. So at some point they went from like.
Ho d that song slaps the duel of the fates, uh, and then they went and did the strings on thong song. Strings for that. That's pretty incredible. Yeah, I assumes good for Cisco. In that oral history, he gives one of my favorite quotes of all time about the first time that he saw a thong, which is the incident that inspired the song Thong Song. He says, and I quote, do you ever see that movie The Ten Commendments. It's an old school movie. Charlton Heston. At first, when he
was in Egypt, his hair was dark. Then he went up in the mountains and saw God, and when he came back down his hair was silver. That's literally what
happened to me. He also claims that the reason that the video has so many of women in it upside down was because the FCC was like, you can't show thongs in a music video, and Cisco says, quote, I was like, what if you shot the girls upside down, then technically it's not a thong, which I don't get, but sure, and they says that's why on the beach we shoot at that angle and we got away with it.
And once we got away with.
That, it's like we opened the floodgates for how much booty you could sh show in a video.
This specs the question. Is Cisco smart?
Actually he's not wrong, but he's also not right because there were like two Live Crew videos Baby Got Back, Baby Got Basket.
We'll talk about it soon on the show Rex and Effects.
Shaker is another big one from that sort of tillation early nineties era, but.
No I interviewed Uncle Luke from two Live Crew of h one. We did a picture me.
Oh, I love that.
It's a video of that somewhere.
It was on video. That's incredible.
Lastly, my other favorite Cisco bit is that he contacted Victoria's secret because he was like, Hey, you know, I've got this number one song in the country about thongs. Let's take a meeting, and they did, but apparently they kind of nicely laughed him off because by the time he got in contact with them, thong sales had already gone up eighty percent.
Hey, you've done our.
Work for Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well speak, Yeah, we're winding down. We're winding down.
I don't know.
Are there miss bikinis in the monoculture? Tweet at us at because of the monoculture.
Well, speaking of bikinis and money, before we wrap up, I'd like to discuss the most expensive bikini in the world. And it was created by jeweler Susan Rosen for a Sports Illustrated shoot with model Molly Sims. And the piece is made from over one hundred and fifty carrots of flawless diamonds set in platinum. Now, Heigel price is right time. Would you care to guess without going over what is this bikini valued at one.
Hundred and fifty carrots of diamonds set in platinum. But it's not that big because it's a bikini.
Yeah, it's actually very very small. Yeah, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Oh, way way more. It's obscene.
No, it's two mil up up, up, up up. You're kidding, Nope, nope, no, just go ahead then thirty million. Holy yeah, oh my god. Yeah, well this country is so that then they bailed out the banks like the last Jesus Christ, this country is diseased.
Yes, thirty million dollars.
Thirty million dollars. Yeah, a single magazine cover. I don't know if it was even a cover.
I don't know.
I don't understand what function it served. But but google it it's it's uh, oh my god. Yeah, I don't I don't really understand why it exists. Holy well, but uh what but you know, how yeah?
What? How else does the bikini evolved?
Yes, this brings us to a segmentatic to call the bikini in the twenty first century. Please my take my m y U class. I'm an adjunct professor the bikini in the twenty first century. Now, this thirty million dollar bikini can do many things, but it cannot charge your phone. But thankfully there's a Brooklyland based designer named Andrew Schneider,
and he took care of this problem. In twenty eleven, he unveiled the solar bikini, which is a bikini made of solar panels with a socket in the bottom to charge your devices while you tan a USB socket and it went into very limited production, but according to Schneider, each solar paneled swimsuit took up to eighty hours to make, and as a result, it can be quite pricey, ranging can cost from five hundred dollars to fifteen hundred dollars and up In said, yes, but I personally feel good
that fascinating new advances and bikini technology are being made well into the new millennium.
And I think that brings us up to now. I mean, what else is there to say about the good old bikini. The world's first bikini museum is currently under construction in bad Rappaow in Germany.
Why there the place that banned bikinis, I know, seventies.
Wow, they're making atonement. But by some figures cited last year in Women's Wear Daily, the global swim market was worth more than sixteen billion in twenty twenty. That's oil industry numbers, baby, and some estimates put its growth to anywhere from twenty one to twenty nine billion by twenty twenty five, which makes sense because wow, we're all gonna be cooked alive by then. Less monetarily, there's at least
one historian. Her name is Beth Dincuff Charleston, who's worked at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Parsons School of Design, found a quote from her from two thousand and seven saying the bikini represents a social leap involving body consciousness, moral concerns, and sexual attitudes, which all told not a bad pool quote for something named after the atomic bomb test. Well, Jordan, it's time
for me to take this. Itsy bitsy teeny weeny little episode, little little episode aikini and beach party blanket bingo my way out of here. Jordan has this tradition of just letting me punch myself out at air trying to find a kicker for these episodes. What we need to do is just fade in one of those like shitty like beach blanket bingo style songs.
Yeah, what do you got weekend?
The Party peer by Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters. What's from that thing you do? Oh?
Okay, okay, okay, No, I want you to do your DJ voice and introduce this. Well, go ahead, yeah, I'd give us the Dick Duvet voice as.
All right, folks, with a ride out tonight, We're taking here the weekend and party peer with Captain Geeche and the Shrimp Shack Shooters. Keep it cool, folks, have a great weekend, folks.
Thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel.
That was DJ Dick Duvet and we'll see you next time.
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.
The supervising producer is Mike Johns.
The show was.
Researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel.
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