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Hello, and welcome to this day in history class, a show that uncovers a little bit more about history every day. I'm Gabe Luzier, and today we're looking at the story behind one of the most polarizing summer fashions of all time. You can love it or loathe it, but the one thing you can't do is ignore it.

The day was July 5, 1946.

French designer Louis Riyar introduced the world to the bikini.

The revealing two-piece bathing suit made its debut at a poolside fashion show

at the Paisin-Molitor Hotel Complex in Paris.

It was modeled by Michelin Bernardini, an exotic dancer at a local

casino who had agreed to wear the skimpy outfit after all the professional models in town refused.

The swimsuits unveiling was considered quite scandalous at the time, which is ironic when you consider that

women had already worn bikini-like garments in public nearly 2,000 years earlier. Roman mosaics

from the 4th century depict ancient female athletes wearing two-piece outfits as early as 1400 BC.

It's true those garments wouldn't have been worn to go swimming,

but that's just because all Romans, men and women alike, always swam in the nude. By the turn of

the 20th century, though, many European cultures had gotten much more prudish about showing skin

in public, especially when it came to women.

Victorian women, for example, wore big, loose-fitting bathing costumes that left pretty much everything to the imagination.

In fact, the culture was so obsessed with concealing the female form that it even devised a special vehicle to roll women

into the water unseen. Known simply as a bathing machine, the device was basically a wooden

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