A bikini is a women's two-piece swimsuit featuring two triangles of fabric on top that cover the woman's breasts , and two triangles of fabric on the bottom: the front covering the pelvis but exposing the navel , and the back covering the buttocks. In May , Parisian fashion designer Jacques Heim released a two-piece swimsuit design that he named the Atome 'Atom' and advertised as "the smallest swimsuit in the world". No runway model would wear it, so he hired a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini to model it at a review of swimsuit fashions. Due to its revealing design, the bikini was considered controversial, facing opposition from a number of groups and being accepted only very slowly by the general public. In many countries, the design was banned from beaches and other public places: in , France banned the bikini from being worn on its coastlines; Germany banned the bikini from public swimming pools until the s, and some communist groups condemned the bikini as a "capitalist decadence".

Last April, my husband and I set aside our pipe dream of buying a cabin in the woods and instead poured all that precious cash into one big hole in the ground. Suddenly, and predictably, our lives revolved around the pool. Dinners became poolside BBQs. Play-dates became pool-dates. There were always, always, towels in the dirty clothes hamper.

So I just helped supervise my 6th grade daughter's end of year swim party. About two-thirds of the girls had bikinis on, not modest ones either. Tops were strapless or little triangles.

After reading her son's permission slip to attend a sixth-grade pool party, Jennifer Smith immediately realized the school's note was incredibly sexist, reports Babble. The Indianapolis, Indiana, mom believed the rule that "all girls must wear a non-white T-shirt over their swimsuit" was unfair because there was no regulation for boys other than that they were not allowed to wear Speedos. It was also "setting one standard for half of the student body only promotes the idea that girls bodies are naturally shameful," she told The Huffington Post. As a feminist who wanted to teach her son that no one should ever be ashamed of his or her body, she refused to "let my child participate in any activity that promotes girls body-shaming or tells girls to police their sexuality," she wrote on the permission slip.