IT WAS launched by a French automobile engineer, it took its name from the site of a nuclear test and it was an instant failure.

But 60 years later, France is preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the bikini with due reverence for a garment that changed the world of fashion like no other.

Les Galeries Lafayette, is staging an exhibition in homage to the two-piece swimsuit. Assouline, the publisher, has brought out a 396-page guide to its history. And designers have been asked to produce examples of their work.

After ignoring the 50th birthday of one of the great modern, Gallic inventions, which was commemorated in the US but virtually nowhere else, France is determined not to miss out again. “Le Bikini a 60 ans” (The bikini is 60 years old), said Le Figaro yesterday in a banner headline above photographs of Ursula Andress, Bo Derek, Melanie Griffith and Elle MacPherson — all demonstrating how the French creation has conquered the globe.

The beginnings, however, were inauspicious.

In 1946 Louis Réard, a car engineer who had taken over his mother’s lingerie boutique near Les Folies Bergères in Paris, met with disbelief when he brought out a new range of skimpy, two-piece swimsuits made from just 70cms (27½in)of cloth.

Although similar garments had been worn by Roman and Greek women to the baths, they were considered shocking in M Réard’s day. Provocatively, his garment revealed the navel — a part of the anatomy banned as indecent from Hollywood films under the Hays Code in the 1930s.

Not even his great rival, the French designer, Jacques Heim, had been so daring. M Heim boasted that his swimsuits were small, but they still covered le nombril.

M Réard went a step further. “My bikini is smaller than the smallest swimsuit,” he said. And he caused such a scandal that he was unable to find a fashion model to wear le maillot de bain, which he had named after the Pacific atoll where the US had just carried out its first peacetime nuclear test.

In the end, he persuaded Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, to pose with it on. But sales were disappointing.

With his invention denounced as immoral by the Vatican, and banned by Spain, Portugal and Italy, M Réard went back to designing orthodox knickers to sell in his mother’s shop.

“Our readers dislike the bikini, which has transformed certain coastlines into the backstage of music halls and which does not embellish women,” wrote Vogue in 1951.

However, the concept survived, and when Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth were photographed in it, the bikini began to thrive. In the following decade, Jayne Mansfield provided further publicity for M Réard in the US, as did Bardot in France with her 1956 film, And God Created Woman. In 1960 Brian Hyland’s Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini gave the garment another boost, and by the time Raquel Welch wore it for the magazine Life in 1966, the sense of scandal had largely disappeared. In 1969, when Barbara Windsor appeared in Carry on Camping, it was not even considered risqué in conservative Britain.

Today British women spend about £45 million on bikinis every year, and about £90 million on one-piece swimsuits. In France, le bikini accounts for 50 per cent of the female swimwear market.

SUITS YOU, MA’AM

Garrison Keillor, the American humourist, said: “Looking at a girl in a bikini is like have a loaded revolver on the table: there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s difficult to think of anything else”

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