It figures: The bikini was created by men. It happened 60 years ago in — again, no surprise here — France.

But it's women who embraced the belly-baring bathing suit and haven't let go.

Kelly Killoren Bensimon, a model turned magazine editor, wrote "The Bikini Book" (Assouline), which documents how significant the tiny two-piece has been to the world since Jacques Heim and Louis Reard introduced competing versions of the small suit.

What sets the bikini apart from other two-piece bathing suits is its miniature size. (Killoren Bensimon defines a bikini as anything that dips below the belly button.)

Women in bandeau tops and separate bottoms appeared in ancient wall paintings dating to 1400 B.C., Killoren Bensimon reports. Burlesque and vaudeville performers wore two-piece outfits in the 1920s. And in 1932, French designer Madeleine Vionnet offered an exposed midriff in an evening gown. Then, in 1935, American designer Claire McCardell cut out the side panels of a maillot-style bathing suit that's seen as the bikini's forerunner.

But when Reard presented "le bikini" at a Paris swimming pool in the summer of 1946, he couldn't even find a model to wear it. Instead, Micheline Bernardini, a stripper-dancer, put it on — and created a global sensation.

The name "bikini" came from another historic event: The testing of atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific that same summer. Bensimon says that it was common during the World War II era for pop culture to borrow words from military lingo — hence, "blonde bombshell," for example.

Writing about the bikini is "a perfect fit" for Killoren Bensimon. "I love fashion and the bikini is social history, which I also love, and I'm an avid bikini wearer," she says.

Killoren Bensimon is editor of Elle Accessories and has written other books focusing on American style. She is donating a portion of the proceeds of "The Bikini Book" to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The author proves her personal affinity with the bikini before readers even before the first chapter. There's a photo of the statuesque Killoren Bensimon in a brown string bikini top and skimpy bottoms held together at the hips by wide rings, in the surf of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, with one of her two daughters, who also is in a bikini.

"The navel is a zone of contention," Killoren Bensimon says during a recent interview. "It's a different kind of exposure than people are used to. In the '60s, it was so sexy — everything was about the sexual revolution. In the '50s, top movie actresses wore bikinis to prove their credibility. Now an actor wouldn't ever pose in a bikini. They never do pinups. Now if you're a pinup girl, you're not taken seriously, but back then, you were a nobody if you didn't do a pinup in a bikini."

In the 1950s, the public was seduced by the bikini, especially if worn by Jayne Mansfield or Brigitte Bardot.

Bardot tested how low a bikini could go, Killoren Bensimon says with a laugh, and it turns out it can go so low that the bathing suit looks more like a strip of fabric no more than a few inches wide. Such a tiny garment made sense for all those sunbathers on the French Riviera.

Even now, the fashion set boasts of packing "a wardrobe of bikinis and just a few things to throw over them" for their glamorous vacations in the Caribbean, notes Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute in Manhattan.

"So much of fashion is about showing off your body. Clothes are the frame to show off the perfect you. Bikinis are pretty demanding that way," she adds.

But, Steele says, bikinis also can be an affordable point of entry into the designer market. Designers began putting bikinis on the catwalk in the 1980s, and they're an increasingly important ancillary product.

Movies have been an important part of the bikini's history — and they continue that role today. Aside from Bardot's "And God Created Women," bikini images burned into our minds include Ursula Andress in "Dr. No" and Halle Berry, who re-created that look 40 years later in another James Bond flick, "Die Another Day."

Then came the Sports Illustrated swimsuit covers — and later swimsuit issues — and Cheryl Tiegs posters. This is around the same time Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz made headlines in the lowest-cut men's bikini to date, the Lycra Speedo.

Killoren Bensimon pushed to include men in the book. Many of the pictures are of European playboy types, she notes, mostly because they're the ones who tend to wear bikinis.

Who else wears bikinis?

"Any woman can wear a bikini — and any man can wear a bikini. In '74, Lycra was introduced in bikinis and that held you in more. It makes bikinis approachable," she says. "There are so many choices. If you need a bigger top, you get a smaller bottom. If you need a bigger bottom, you get a smaller top. You make it your own. A surfer, a socialite, a rocker — there's a bikini for you."