Do you know why a two-piece swimsuit is called a bikini? It relates to the nuclear bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in the 40s and 50s. Bikini comes from the Marshallese name for the atoll, Pikinni (bikini is the German colonial transliteration)...

The French designer who invented the modern two-piece swimsuit design in 1946 called it the “Atome” or atom as in atom bomb. A designer who made an even smaller version and called it “bikini” after Bikini Atoll where the United States conducted 23 tests of nuclear bombs...

It suggested that the smaller version was more dangerous and men’s reaction to the two-piece swimsuit would be “explosive.” The joke at the time was that that the "bikini" split the "atom", because it was introduced right after a the swimsuit called the Atome...

Yes, the swimsuit was named after bombs dropped on the ancestral land of the Marshallese. I was sharing this with some kupuna and was surprised to hear they remember going to the beach to see light from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. Hawai'i is not that close to Bikini Atoll...

The blasts were huge — one bomb dropped on Bikini in 1954 was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The US promised the residents of Bikini Atoll that they would be able to return after the tests but the radiation levels there are still too high...

It’s weird to see how obsessed people were over big bombs after WWII. This obsession resulted in multiple bomb metaphors at the time from Marilyn Monroe being a “bombshell” to women in scantily clad swimwear being dangerous like a bomb...

It’s also gross that a Marshallese word has been equated with nuclear blasts and the displacement of the native people of those islands.