Ursula Andress in Dr. No Sixty-two years ago, on July 5, 1946, French designer Louis Reard unveiled a daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris. However, Parisian women were too embarrassed to model it, so Reard hired showgirl Micheline Bernardini to wear the inaugural "bikini."
Reard named his design after a U.S. atomic bomb exploded off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week. Ever since, you might say, “bombshells” have been particularly attracted to bikinis.
By 1962 the US quit blowing up the atoll after 23 tests, and the bikini – slow to be adopted by women in America – exploded on the scene with Ursula Andress playing Honey Ryder in the James Bond film Dr. No.
Throughout the 1960s millions of adolescent males would be exposed to Ursula Andress in the pages of Playboy, thereby imprinting her as a bikini original.
The Bikini Atoll will be radioactive another few hundred years, about as long as Hugh Hefner and the bikini will be around.
Ursula Andress in Dr. No 