The Tamesis
In hindsight, the hype surrounding nude clothing at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival is a bit ironic. Yes, the red carpet that stretches along the Promenade is famous for its age-old dress codes, with Bella Hadid, Dakota Johnson and others at the mercy of normative film buffs for daring to partake in purity and sexiness. But it was the Cannes Film Festival that first brought the bikini (amongst all the items included in non-formal attire) into the public consciousness.
Although evidence of bikini bras can be found as far back as ancient Rome—a mosaic at the Villa Casale in Sicily depicts women exercising in a two-piece garment dating back to 400 AD—there is still debate over who invented the modern bikini, cut to lingerie proportions. (Fashion designer Jacques Heim and mechanical engineer Louis Réard both claim to be the first to introduce the silhouette on the French Riviera in the summer of 1946.) But no matter who created it first—and for what it’s worth, Réard holds the actual patent—some styles can only be born at specific moments. This was the liberation of the post-war period, when the convergence of wanting to tan and showing some skin was newly accepted among socially progressive young people.
It took a while for the bikini to catch on in the more liberal milieu of southern France—the navel-banning Hays Code of 1934 banned the design from American screens, Pope Pius XII declared the bikini sinful, and countries like Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain enacted state-wide bans—which is where Cannes (and Brigitte Bardot, who tragically died at 91) came into play.
It was 1953, when an 18-year-old Bardot caused a global sensation when she posed for photos on the beach wearing a tropical print bikini. Sailors lined the boardwalk to catch a glimpse of the actress, while a woman sunbathing in a coat, leggings and an ankle-length skirt looked on with her mouth open in bewilderment. For those who haven’t seen the 1952 film “ marina, girl in bikiniIn Bardot, Bardot plays Marina, a girl in a bikini, which would have been considered a crude, indecent act of exhibitionism – although I’m sure it was an act of provocation to all those lovesick naval officers.
It was all part of a genius game plan to promote the same film, during which Bardot had her photos taken on every beach in the south of France. But it might also have been a tacit project to promote Cannes itself – the aftershocks of the photos were likened to the worst explosion, Diana Vreeland described the bikini as “the most important thing since the atomic bomb” (the design was actually named after a nuclear testing site in the Western Pacific called Bikini Atoll), and it was largely thanks to Bardot that the swimsuit became mainstream and sexualised throughout the 1950s. The sixties and beyond. Later, Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren were photographed similarly while attending the Cannes Film Festival, and the whole beach babe thing became a mid-21st century tradition for Hollywood stars visiting the Riviera.
