Bikini!

What a funny thing for your Two Chums to come up with the week before Thanksgiving, you might say, but we saw this and thought, “Who doesn’t always love a little laugh?”!

The string bikini as we know it was invented in 1946 by French automotive engineer-turned fashion designer Louis Réard. The design featured four triangles of fabric — two for the bottom, two for the top — and spaghetti straps.

Expecting an explosive reaction to his daring design, Réard named the suit for Bikini Atoll in the Pacific islands, where the U.S. conducted atomic bomb testing starting in the mid-1940s.

A nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini first modeled the provocative swimwear, in part because no runway model could be convinced to pose in something so revealing. Within the decade that followed, however, the bikini became ubiquitous, thanks in part to Hollywood stars such as Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe popularizing the style, as well as the rapidly changing social norms in the post-World War II era.

In the years since, the triangles have become much smaller and there are only three with a string for the back!

How about that? Named after an island!