GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA, ONE OF THE FIRST BIKINI GIRL, DIES AT THE AGE OF 95.

In a previous article (https://bikiniandpompomgirls.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-most-beautiful-girl-in-world-to.html), we saw that after its creation, in 1946, by the French engineer Louis Réard, and the fashion designer Jacques Heim, the bikini, considered too daring for the mores of the time, did not know an immediate popular success.  It wasn't until the early 1950s, when movie stars like Brigitte Bardot and Gina Lollobrigida wore it, either in films, or posing for wide-ranging photos, that common women began to wear it timidly, and then increasingly in the 1960s.

Legendary diva Gina Lollobrigida died last week at the venerable age of 95.  Back in 1950, her photos showing her in a bikini played an important role in launching her great film career.  At the age of 20, in 1947, she studied at the School of Fine Arts in Rome.  To pay for her studies and bring home some money, after her family was ruined by the 39-45 war, she landed a few small roles in the cinema and she participated in beauty contests.

Her first big film contract will be granted to her by the renowned American producer Howard Hughes.  Falling under the spell of the young woman after seeing one of these photos where she poses in a bikini, Hughes brings her to Hollywood after signing her a contract.

Literally crazy about her body, of sculptural beauty, with voluptuous forms, he will lock her up for months in a Los Angeles hotel room.  Sometimes, during the night, he rents an orchestra, and he takes her out of the room to dance with her in the hotel restaurant.  Lollo, as she was later nicknamed, will eventually free herself from her confinement and she will participate in some American films.  For thirteen years, Hughes will try to seduce her.  In vain ...

Subsequently, Gina Lollobrigida will play the main roles (in 30 years she turned in more than sixty films) in cinematographic successes such as «Fanfan la Tulipe» (Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952), in which she plays a bohemian character fortune teller, alongside the formidable French actor Gérard Philipe.

The same year, she burst onto the screen in her role as Leila, in René Clair's famous film «Les Belles de Nuit».

In 1957, Gina Lollobrigida won a Bambis Award for Best Actress for her unforgettable role as Esmeralda in the film «Notre-Dame de Paris».

In 1959, her bewitching beauty reached a peak when she played the Queen of Sheba in the film «Solomon and the Queen of Sheba».  His partner, Yul Brynner, who plays King Solomon, is bewitched by the splendid Italian actress.  In scenes where the two actors kiss, they continue to do so even after the director shouts : «cut» !

Subsequently, her career faded somewhat when Sophia Loren, another Italian actress -another beauty queen- came to compete with her.  At first jealous of her new rival, Lollo will eventually make a great friend of her.

Provocative, characterized by her ember gaze reflecting her fiery temperament, she will go too far in 1966, in a new sketch film («The Dolls»), wearing outfits deemed too daring.  She was sentenced to two months in prison, but was fortunately amnestied.

In the 1970s, like Brigitte Bardot, she grew tired of cinema and became a photo journalist.  She also returned to her first love at the School of Fine Arts in Rome by devoting herself to sculpture and drawing.  She will explain that she began to make cinema by pure chance, and that she continued out of curiosity.

From her youth, she dreamed of being a painter.  Her goal was first and foremost to become a visual artist, but she did not regret her career in cinema.  A career that she considered very successful and satisfactory.

Like Bardot, too, at the beginning of her career, she will have the audacity to ask for an exorbitant fee (one million) to turn in films.  Launched as a joke, this immense request, unimaginable fortune for the time, will be accepted, to the great surprise of Gina !

Like Bardot, Lollobrigida will long be considered the most beautiful woman in the world.  Ambitious, she said she wanted to become a very great actress and she refused to be reduced to a status of sex symbol.

In her long and wonderful career, she played with the greatest actors of her time.  Marilyn Monroe will take Gina as a model and the Italian super star will influence her a lot by her advice.  It has been said that she "sculptured" the legendary American blonde actress.

Orson Welles, another great actor, director and producer, called Gina Lollobrigida : «the most fabulous woman in the world, the Queen».

The Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia called her «the archetype of Italian female beauty».  Italians loved her so much that the used to say that she was the greatest discovery since the invention of spaghetti !

Gina Lollobrigida received many prizes and awards (more than 20) for her fabulous career, but the one that perhaps pleased her the most was the latest : her star on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, in Los Angeles, in 2018.  A kind of final consecration or crowning.  She received this ultimute honor with her characteristic exuberance.

Although Gina Lollobrigida married in 1949, at the age of 22, to a Yugoslav doctor named Milko Skofic, who became her manager, and divorced him in 1971 after giving him an only son, she later declared that her only regret in life was never meeting the soul mate.  Many of her countless admirers, for whom she was an extraordinary sexual fantasy, would certainly have liked to be that ideal lover she never found.

In 2017, in some od her latest public confidences, Lollo confessed to having suffered two sexual assaults in her youth.  Events that marked her character and that she was never able to erase from her memory and her being.

After her death on January 16, photographer Rino Barillari, a renowned Italian paparazzi, paid tribute to the late diva : «She was fashion, everyone imitated her.  A person like that will never be reborn.  It is not only a diva of the cinema who has left, but a real global star.  Gina Lollobrigida was something idescribable, everyone was losing their minds for her.  Damn beautiful and a feminity that has marked history».  Including the bikini story, I might add !

Here are some of the eternal looks of Gina Lollobrigida, in a montage on Giorgia's song «Quando Una Stella Muore» (When a Star Dies)...

HISTORY OF THE BIKINI : BRIGITTE BARDOT AND THE PIN UP GIRLS OF THE 1950s

Brigitte Bardot

In 1946, two Frenchmen, engineer Louis Réard, and fashion designer Jacques Heim, were in a strange competition in Paris.

The challenge : make the smallest two-piece bathing suit for women...

But, given the mores of the time, an obstacle stands in this race with minimal dress : the navel !  In the 1940s, showing it was still considered obscene or forbidden.

In fact, many historians consider that Heim already won this race to the tiniest swimsuit in 1932, by creating his prototype called "The Atom" (pictured above).It was a two-piece somewhat similar to the model that will take the name "bikini" after World War II.

What inspired Louis Réard for his own version of the minimalist swimsuit was a phenomenon he had observed on the French beaches of that time.  He had noticed that, in order to get a better tan, some women rolled the edges of their two-pice bathing suit, surreptitiously discovering their "scandalous" navel !

In his engineering head, Réard (pictured above) understood that this need for women to shorten their own bathing suits by rolling the edges, should lead to an adjustment in the making of the garment.

After all, like many scientific inventions, this is how the bikini was born.  First, the observation of a problem, a need, a desire, or a questionable fact.  Then, the imagination gets to work to find a solution.  This solution then takes shape on the drawing board.  And it is carried out with material means and a skin-fine that proceeds by trial and error.

Thus, in 1946, with more or less accuracy, Réard developed the bikini we know today : a top covering most of the breasts; a stocking, with a triangle at the front to hide the inner part, and at the back enough fabrics to cover more or less half of the buttocks.

Once his invention was made, Louis Réard planned to sell it, as he was also a businessman operating his mother's lingerie shop near the Folies Bergères in Paris.  In order to attrack customers or buyers of his new product, the engineer had to show case it, market it and advertise it.

To do this, Réard was looking for a mannequin -an alive one- to make demonstrations in public.  But his bikini was so daring for the manners of the time, that no one wanted to wear it.

Running out of volunteers, Réard takes great measures.  To present his creation to the world, he hires a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, Micheline Bernardini (pictured above).

On July 5, 1946, she caused a sensation by appearing, almost completely naked, at the Molitor Pool, in front of the public and photographers, in Réard's minimalist bathing suit !  An instant star, Bernardini has a multitude of admirers, especially among men.  In the days following her audacious presentation, she received no less than 50 000 letters !

But Louis Réard is too far ahead of his time.  His bikini is scandalous and he can't sell it.  Worse, his competitor, Jacques Heim, was more successful in selling a more conservative two-piece bathing suit (like the one pictured above), revealing less of the female anatomy.  However, the clientele remains quite marginal.  It is limited to a small number of wealthy and sophisticated Higher-class Europeans.

Esther Williams

For the bikini to return to store shelves, it will take a bang.  And it is a young woman, many considered the most beautiful in the world, who will give this momentum, so desired by Réard, to take off and boost the sales of his invention hitherto sullied by the ordinary people.

Indeed, at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1953, the blonde and very beautiful French actress Brigitte Bardot dazzled the world by posing in a very sexy bikini.  Bardot launched a fashion that then spread to the adjacent beaches of Saint-Tropez, a town on the French Riviera that quickly became the bikini capital of the world.

Ava Gardner

Other movie and show business stars and pin-up girls will emulate Bardot in the 1950s.  These resplendent and illustrious fans of the new bikini include : Esther Williams, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren.

Marilyn Monroe

But, in several American states, or European countries (such as Italy, Spain and Portugal, the bikini is banned.  Wearing it is illegal.  Violators can be fined.  The Pope also condemns the wearing of the bikini.

Sophia Loren

And if, as we approach the 1960s, some magazines or newspapers are showing people in bikinis, these pictures are retouched or censored so that readers can't look at this outrageous navel that no one should see !

Here are some photos of bikini models of the 1950s on a grestest hit of the year 1953 : «Look at that Girl», by Guy Mitchell !

INVENTION OF THE "NEW" BIKINI : NOT UNLIKE SOME GREAT DISCOVERIES OF THE PAST.

In my first post, we saw that two-piece bikini-like garments were worn by women for athletic purposes in Ancient Greece, as far back as 1 400 BC.  It seemed like a natural thing that, even in these times : design followed function.  But it was not as simple as that.  You know the adage : other times, other morals.  What seems natural in some societies is often inadmissible or licentious in others, even in our world that we call the "global village".  The way different peoples see things depends of who (political authorities, interest group, etc) has the power to rule the society.

In occidental countries, the Catholic Church had such a powerful influence up until the middle of the last century, that it could determine what was right and what was wrong.  Kings, dictators, or even democratic leaders could not govern without the advices or the rules imposed by the religious authorities.  In the fist two millenniums of our era, as a citizen or an inhabitant of a christian country, you were not allowed to do or say something that the priests and the Pope would condemn.  They hold the truth and nobody could challenge them on almost any question even for matters, like those related to sciences, they did not have the competence to understand or judge.  They would even threaten, imprison, torture or kill people who did'nt agree with them on some conflicting issues.

For examples, great discoverers like Copernicus and Galileo were forced by the Church to deny their brilliant theories about the earth, because these findings went against the dogmatic views or the superstitions of the christian religion.  Galileo was found guilty of heresy even if he provided evidence for his heliocentric theory by using a telescope.  Later, when Charles Darwin elaborated his theory of the evolution, it was impossible for the Catholic Church to accept that we "were all apes".  It was in complete contradiction of the "official story" told in the Genesis (first book of the Old Testament).

Of course, we can not compare the invention of the "modern bikini" to the great discoveries made by Copernicus, Galileo or Darwin.  But the creation of this new bathing suit in 1946 had a shocking impact too.  And, for the religious authorities, it was a unacceptable scandal !  A monster of indecency !  In many countries, not long after his invention, the bikini was condemned and banned.  His inventor, French engineer Louis Réard (1897-1984), knew that his new creation would be a "bomb" !  That's the reason why he named it after Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific, the site of an atomic bomb test on July 1, 1946.  And, compared to the beachwears of the first 30 years of the century (picture above), the bikini was so small that it seems to "split the Atome", like Réard used to say.  This innovation was to expose the navel.  How shocking !

If Réard did "split the Atome", it was because one of his competitor, fashion designer Jacques Heim (1889-1967), had already created the "Atome" (picture above), which, he claimed, was, in 1932, the smallest bathing suit ever.  Réard, who was running his mother's lingerie boutique near "Les Folies Bergères", in Paris, wanted to challenge this title.  Like all the great inventors, he was a very good observer.  He had noticed that women were rolling up their beachwear to get a better tan.  By doing so, they were expressing a need.  Réard found the solution.  He sliced the top off the bottoms and advertised these new two-piece as "smaller than the smallest swimsuit".

But Réard's invention was so audacious and ahead of his time that he could not find a model to wear his first bikini.  He ended up hiring Micheline Bernardini (picture above), a nude dancer from the "Casino de Paris".  She was first seen, wearing the famous tiny two-piece, on July 5, at Piscine Molitor, a public pool in Paris.  Her bikini was a string one, with a g-string back of 30 square inches (194 cm²) of cloth with newspaper type print.

And yes !  It was quite a hit (a bomb), especially among men.  The beautiful Micheline Bernardini received 50 000 letters, and Réard's business soared !  We can see him (picture above, in 1946) adjusting his popular "polka dot strapless bikini" on another queen of beauty.  But if the bikini was a success on the beaches of France, as early as in 1947, it would take time to be welcomed elsewhere...  We will see that in the next posts...