This tiny fashion item

This tiny fashion item has had an impact way beyond its size when it emerged in Paris in 1946. Once denounced by the Vatican as immoral, these days British women spend about forty-five million pounds on bikinis every year. It's hard to believe that the bikini is now a pensioner - with France celebrating sixty years since the scandalous birth of those three small triangles, which one critic complained revealed everything about a girl apart from her mother's maiden name. Few, though, realise that the itsy-bitsy two-piece was one of France's main gifts to the fashion world - invented by a French car engineer, Louis Reard, who clearly understood the laws both of gravity and aerodynamics. He was running his mother's underwear shop in Paris when inspiration struck. He took away half the fabric of an ordinary swimsuit - to reveal the belly button - and a superstar was born. He named the invention after America's first nuclear test in the Pacific - presuming it would cause a similar explosion. And it did. In 1951, the Miss World competition banned it, saying any contestant wearing one would gain an unfair advantage. In 1955 the late British actress, Diana Dors, wore a mink bikini to the Venice Film festival, winning as many column inches as Brigitte Bardot frolicking in her skimpy two-piece in the film 'And God Created Woman'. For others, the garment's seminal moment came in the Bond film, Dr No, in 1962 when Ursula Andress emerged from the waves in a soaking white bikini. Love it or hate it, the bikini is here to stay - outliving one magazine's sniffy prediction that it was inconceivable that any girl of taste or modesty would succumb to wearing such a thing.