FROM THE VAULT: Bikinis: Everything You Didn't Know

To kick off summer, Jordan and Heigl dive deep into the history of the controversial-yet-ubiquitous beachwear, from ancient times through to solar powered swimwear that can charge your cell phone — and one special bikini that costs $30 million! They'll explore the unexpected influence of the atom bomb, the competition between two Frenchmen to craft the tiniest two-piece, and the blowback from movie stars and religious leaders alike. Plus they'll also turn their attention to iconic bikini moments in pop culture, through James Bond, '60s Beach Party movies and Sisqo's 'Thong Song.' (Recorded in 2022.)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
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

(00:31):
the sheer scope of its influence.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
That's right, folks, In honor of the official.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Start of summer, we are talking about bikinis.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Jordan. I feel like this point of.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
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

(01:06):
of fifties sixties like beach blanket bingo era of pop
culture bikini influence is probably up your alley.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Mic love references to a minimum, but.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
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

(01:44):
be definitely a fun tangent to go down.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Saw a classic, Yeah, wait, where did you see this?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Here's everything you didn't know about bikinis.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
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

(03:23):
were playing around in the water for centuries because swimming
was limited to people who lived there.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
You were not.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
You're not taking the oxen and cart and family down
to the beach for a day because half of you would.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Die down the shore.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
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

(04:07):
until the Middle Ages.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, it's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
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

(04:31):
swimsuits that look like something out of a Frankie in
a net movie.

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Basically, it's really strange how that style.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Like yeah, yeah, you said you just sort of.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Like taking what was the expression, taking the waters? Taking
the waters?

Speaker 2 (06:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
I'm guessing because as you said, he was a randy
old man who was rumored to have died of syphilis.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Like woola material I could imagine.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Yeah, And they would weigh the hem downs to keep
them from floating up.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
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

(07:06):
would just sink like a stone.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Those were old.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Oh, modesty tunnel.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
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.

(08:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
How did people not drown in these?

Speaker 3 (08:12):
I know? It's really wild.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
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

(08:36):
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

(08:58):
that technically also a row I don't know.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
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,

(09:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
Swimming bags. Yeah. Yeah, Net Kellerman is such a fascinating person.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
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

(10:00):
kind of the venus on the shell situation.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
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

(10:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeh. Bummer.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
That's got to be racist. I assume that's a deeply
racist sentiment.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
It's offensive on multiple levels.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
It's like jazz and the blues and burlesque.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Really, I would have assumed that was like French Vaudeville.
I could see being Oh, I guess that's musical, because yeah,
Vaudeville has.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
Its roots of music hall. Burlesque I believe is a
holy American invention, Jamie, can we get a fact check
on that?

Speaker 1 (11:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
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

(12:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
That might have been dal, that might have been Dow.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
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

(13:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
And therefore if you were pure.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
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

(14:09):
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

(14:31):
gown with an exposed mid drift. And obviously we owe
a huge debt to Busby Berkeley.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
And those films.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
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

(15:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
It's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
I kind of love her. God bless her. She's broken
down so many barriers Share she really truly has.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, this is just something really pretty hilarious that I
came across a few months before the bikini was unveiled.

Speaker 3 (16:36):
In nineteen forty six, there was.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
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

(16:58):
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

(17:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
I want to hear the radio ads for it where
they're like the Midnight Booie.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
For all your nudebathing needs.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
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.

(18:21):
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,

(18:43):
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,

(19:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
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

(19:45):
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

(20:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
So your team Heim, Yeah, technically he's the originator, so yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
But moving on.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
They're French, they have more enlightened attitudes about this kind
of stuff than we do.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
I just think it's interesting to note the ties between
engineers and those who make women's under garments. Howard Hughes,
the legendary.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Eccentric billionaire and saying legendary guy with jars of urin.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
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.

(21:48):
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.

(22:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Know, a more full tan.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (23:02):
But uh, I mean, but.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Go with god, sex and death the two things.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Yeah, you know what American Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
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,

(23:31):
Michelle Bernardini as the very first model.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
I love this.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
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

(24:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
You know that's quite a metaphor not just any ring,
a wedding ring.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
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

(24:56):
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

(25:19):
team or something.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Such a thing.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
It's work in progress.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
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

(26:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
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

(27:10):
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,

(27:31):
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,

(27:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
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

(28:27):
and had taken the form of the bikini.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
I mean, yeah, that papal thing. It reminds me that
Lady Bruce quote, if your body's dirty, the fault.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Lies with the manufacturer.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
So it's funny to me that the Vatican has its
problem with the human form.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Yeah, not like anything else was happening in the priesthood
throughout the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
Umm.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
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.

(29:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
The private pool.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
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

(29:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
Especially in the North.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
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

(30:54):
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,

(31:14):
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.

(31:36):
So the pool went to a local Lions club, which
subsequently and predictably opened it up as a white's only
private facility.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
This country is garbage.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
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

(32:06):
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

(32:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
Beating your kid with a barbecue di spatch, Like.

Speaker 2 (32:43):
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.

(33:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
Boob radio hedge.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
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

(33:57):
six she appears in bikini again in the film and
God Created Women Woman.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
And in the early sixties Emily Post the matron of manners.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
Who what I mean?

Speaker 1 (34:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
She declared the bikini for perfect figures only and only
for the very but.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
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

(35:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, this was Hello Mother, Hello Fodder Camp Grenada came
out around now.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
I feel like, yeah, this is a low.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
Ebb before the Beatles came and rescued us all from
novelty numbers. Ah.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
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

(36:16):
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

(36:38):
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

(37:00):
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

(37:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:44):
So there are all of a sudden the market force.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
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

(38:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Is really interesting.

Speaker 1 (38:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Like Hannah Montana, Right, Yeah, that's good. That's a good example.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
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,

(39:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
And yeah, and this is.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
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

(39:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
It wasn't one of the sort of the.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Any singular pop cultural phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
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

(40:53):
rules about what because of net Funacello again was signed
to Disney for her time in The Mickey Mouse Club.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
She had very specific.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Rules about what kind of bikini she was allowed to wear,
because Old Walt held her to her morals clause in
her Disney contract.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
But yeah, and it's fine.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
That societal mores were changing, but you know they were.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
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

(41:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Well.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
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

(42:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
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

(43:05):
one of the promo photos featured Verkel Welch in the
fur outfit.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
On a crucifix.

Speaker 1 (43:11):
Have you ever seen this picture?

Speaker 3 (43:12):
That is wild? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
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

(43:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
Spot of honor at Chloe Kardashian's house.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
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

(44:11):
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

(44:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
And the other one.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:12):
Well what we got next?

Speaker 2 (45:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
Kate's this is kind of complicated.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
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,

(45:47):
and so I feel it feels gross, is all I'll say.
Full stop.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
She comes to a very quite an interesting show of
his family. I think her dad created the sixty four
thousand dollars question.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
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,

(46:23):
Pee's Big Venture, the Color Purple, the Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice,
the Fugitive, Mister Holland's opis the rain Maker, the holy Man?

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Why did you end with the holy Man's ay Murphy movie?

Speaker 2 (46:35):
It is, yeah, I think I put that in as
a punchline after all of this other iconic stuff that
they've done.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
So they were working at Island.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
Fisher had to wear.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
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

(47:17):
also called it what supermodels will eventually wear in the
seventh level of hell.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
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

(47:45):
creep when it came to Kerrie Fisher.

Speaker 3 (47:47):
Yeah, I know, sure.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
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

(48:10):
wearing underwear.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
You're gonna have to take that off, and she said
why and.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
George said with the most conviction that she said made
her laugh because there's no underwear in space.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
It's just an insane thing to say.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
So I'm really confused about that relationship.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
If it was like playful or if it was there
was a creepy edge to it, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
I probably wrote some of those for VH. Yeah, oh same.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
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

(49:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
I guess, Oh.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
I just forgetting American Pie.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
An honorable mention.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
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

(50:07):
an iconic piece of swimmer in media kind of starts
to fall off with social media, you know.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Or the Internet, I don't know where.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
Yeah, yeah, it's true.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
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

(50:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
Girls one, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
Starring Frankie Avalon. Baby.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
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

(51:31):
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.

(51:52):
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,

(52:16):
which I think is some of them were very good
if they're not like truly straight ahead jazz.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
But yeah, the strings from.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Menace Unified Theory of nineteen ninety nine.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Yeah, exactly. So at some point they went from like.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
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

(53:07):
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

(53:30):
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

(53:52):
we shoot at that angle and we got away with it.

Speaker 3 (53:55):
And once we got away with.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
That, it's like we opened the floodgates for how much
booty you could sh show in a video.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
This specs the question. Is Cisco smart?

Speaker 2 (54:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
We'll talk about it soon on the show Rex and Effects.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Shaker is another big one from that sort of tillation
early nineties era, but.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
No I interviewed Uncle Luke from two Live Crew of
h one. We did a picture me.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
Oh, I love that.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
It's a video of that somewhere.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
It was on video. That's incredible.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
Hey, you've done our.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Work for Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well speak, Yeah, we're winding down.
We're winding down.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Are there miss bikinis in the monoculture? Tweet at us
at because of the monoculture.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
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

(55:31):
this bikini valued at one.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
Hundred and fifty carrots of diamonds set in platinum. But
it's not that big because it's a bikini.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Yeah, it's actually very very small. Yeah, three hundred and
fifty thousand dollars.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
Oh, way way more. It's obscene.

Speaker 4 (55:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Yes, thirty million dollars.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Thirty million dollars. Yeah, a single magazine cover. I don't
know if it was even a cover.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
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?

Speaker 3 (56:36):
What? How else does the bikini evolved?

Speaker 1 (56:38):
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.

(56:59):
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,

(57:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Why there the place that banned bikinis, I know, seventies.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
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

(58:11):
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,

(58:37):
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

(59:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
Yeah, what do you got weekend?

Speaker 1 (59:15):
The Party peer by Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters.
What's from that thing you do? Oh?

Speaker 2 (59:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:47):
Thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
That was DJ Dick Duvet and we'll see you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive.

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
Producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
The supervising producer is Mike Johns.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
The show was.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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