Louis Réard

Louis Réard (; 10 October 1896 – 16 September 1984) was a French automobile engineer and fashion designer who introduced the modern two-piece bikini in July 1946. He ran a swimsuit store in Paris where he sold bikinis for 40 years.

Early life Louis Réard was born on 10 October 1896 in Lille, France to Dominique Réard and Marie Dufrenoy.

Launching the bikini Réard was an automotive engineer who took over his mother's lingerie business in about 1940 and became a clothing designer near the Folies Bergère in Paris. While on beaches in Saint-Tropez, he noticed women rolling up the edges of their swimsuits to get a better tan, The bottom of Heim's swimsuit was just large enough to cover the wearer's navel. To promote his new design, Heim hired skywriters to fly above the Mediterranean resort advertising the Atome as "the world’s smallest bathing suit."

Réard quickly produced his own swimsuit design, which was a string bikini consisting of four triangles made from only of fabric printed with a newspaper pattern.

He introduced his new swimsuit, which he named the bikini, to the media and public in Paris on 5 July 1946 at Piscine Molitor, a popular public pool in Paris at the time. He introduced his design four days after the first test of a nuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll. The event received widespread coverage in the press, and Réard hoped for the same with his design. It was marketed with the slogan, "The bikini, the first anatomical bomb" .

Réard hired his own skywriters to fly over the French Riviera advertising his design as "smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world." Photographs of Micheline Bernardini and articles about the event were widely carried by the press. The International Herald Tribune alone ran nine stories on the event. Fourteen days later, Réard applied for a patent for his design, and was awarded patent number 19431.

Marketing of the bikini The bikini was very popular, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.

Later life and death Réard eventually opened a bikini shop in Paris and sold swimsuits for 40 years.