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SCMP Reporter

Forget all those celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the bikini this year, they are wrong.

  At least that's the view of ageing British artist Osmund Caine.

  For the past half-century the accepted view has been that the bikini, that two-piece exercise in modesty or immodesty, depending upon your stance, was the creation of a French structural engineer, Louis Reard, who came upon the idea after the American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.

  But like Compact Discs and computer softwear, the bikini is really just another intellectual property rights saga, a tale of an old man who perhaps could have got rich but never realised what he may have invented.

  Frenchman Reard's creation was first modelled by dancer Micheline Bernardini at a Paris show on July 5, 1946, going on to shock the fashion world and actually being banned on some beaches until the 1960s.

  But what made the bikini so different from the shorts and bra arrangement shown off by Deborah Kerr in the 1960s musical South Pacific, and of course featuring its own wartime theme?   Fashion historian Alison Carter claims the two-piece was seen as early as 1934. 'At that time, it only revealed the midriff,' she said.

  'The dangerous thing about the bikini was that it dared to show the navel.

  'It has been a remarkably durable example of fashion and I think it will remain so.'   But like so many claims to being the inventor of something innately simple, someone got there before Louis Reard. In this case it was Caine, who gave visual form to the two-piece swim suit with exposed navel in 1938 in a painting called simply Bathing Beach.

  It features women in two-pieces resting on an English beach in front of bathing huts. There is also a topless woman in the scene but we shall ignore that for this purpose.

  Caine had lived in ignorance of his apparent visual invention until he started reading all about the 50th anniversary of the bikini a few days ago. He just thought bikinis had been around since time immemorial.

  What irks him now is not that somebody else took the kudos.

  It is that he missed out on the commercial exploitation of a great idea himself.

  'I wish I had made this discovery earlier,' said Caine. 'Had I the wit at the time, I would have made sure I got the patent and took all the royalties.

  'Then I would not have had to worry quite so much about my artistic career.'   Caine admits he would have preferred to have painted the women naked, but this was 1938 Britain after all.

  There are, of course, hundreds of great ideas for long accepted as the original work of one party which might very well have been invented by another; that is what patent law is all about.

  For every great and usually money-spinning invention there is a small guy who suggests he made the first drawing on the back of a cigarette packet or put together the first model in a back room late at night.

  There was the recent case of the German inventor living in Italy who claimed that he, rather than Sony, created the Walkman.

  He lost his case but wisely used the British courts to try to prove it - gaining some GBP500,000 (HK$5.98 million) in legal aid into the bargain.

  For every obvious invention there must be some little man somewhere trying desperately to prove that he was the one who actually did it first.

  Not that we will seriously expect the French to back down on the issue of the bikini. Reard's original was made of cotton, decorated with French newspaper headlines about the explosion on Bikini and would fit into a matchbox. It does sound rather stunning.



Big split over the bikini's history