The Two-Piece Ouroboros

The bikini takes its name from a Pacific island. The island’s name comes from coconuts. And somehow, that all makes sense.

The two-piece swimsuit debuted in 1946, right as the United States was conducting atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Fashion designer Louis Réard named the garment after the site, calculating (accurately) that it would create as much of a blast in popular culture as the bombs did in the Pacific.

But the name Bikini goes further back. It’s an adaptation from the Marshallese word Pikinni. Pikinni is made up of: pik ‘surface’, -in (a genitive marker, ‘of’), and ni ‘coconuts’. So the name means something like ‘surface of coconuts’.

And thus the name bikini—born of an atoll, borrowed by fashion, and placed on proverbial coconuts—wraps back around. As with the Neanderthal, the name is another neat little ouroboros, in two pieces.