He wasn’t the inventor of the first two-piece swimsuit, that accolade must go to Jacques Heim, but Louis Reard’s swimsuit, introduced in 1946, was skimpy enough to show the wearer’s navel. So skimpy, in fact, that he had trouble finding a woman to wear it on a cat walk and had to hire a nude dancer, one Micheline Bernardini, to wear it. It turned out to be a great job for her and moved her career up more than a notch or two.

The bikini didn’t catch on immediately but in the 1950s, when the US started testing nuclear bombs on the South Pacific Bikini atoll, Louis Reard decided to use the name for his swimsuit hoping it would be just as sensational.

It was. And when such beauties as Brigitte Bardot wore one in her 1957 film And God Created Women and Raquel Welsh wore one in One Million Years BC the bikini reached phenomenal heights in the fashion world. It was seen by some as a symbol of women’s expression, an emblem of women’s freedom, and by others as a scandalous humiliation to women. So much so that it was banned in many places, which only helped its popularity along.

Ever since, the bikini has, depending on your point of view, turned women into mere sexual objects or helped with their emancipation. But either way, it has had an enormous impact on popular culture and the world of fashion.

This image of Bond girl Honeychile Rider emerging from the sea in a white bikini with a knife tucked into a wide belt became so iconic that it was repeated forty years later in another Bond film, Die Another Day starring Halle Berry.