page_title: Bikini in popular culture
section_title: Clubs
hierarchical_section_title: Bikini in popular culture / Services / Clubs
caption_attribution_description: Go-go dancers at the Lizard Lounge, Dallas, Texas (2011)
context_page_description: The modern bikini made its debut in 1946, and since then it has caught the popular imagination becoming probably the most popular women's swimsuit, and not necessarily for swimming. Today, bikinis appear in competitions, films, magazines, music, literature, and even video games. Despite the easy availability of more revealing glamour imagery, bikini modeling remains popular and can still create controversy. Portrayals of the bikini in popular culture led, to a large extent, to its acceptance by Western society at large. In 1960, Brian Hyland's pop song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" inspired a bikini-buying spree. The white bikini worn by Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in the 1962 James Bond film Dr. No has been cited as one of the most famous bikinis of all time. By 1963, the movie Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, led a wave of films that made the bikini a pop-culture symbol. Playboy first featured a bikini on its cover in 1962. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue debuted two years later.
context_section_description: Go-go dancers who perform as a dancer to fast, energetic, popular music are employed to entertain crowds in places such as bars, nightclubs and discothèques in a sexually exciting manner while wearing very little clothing, often a bikini. Go-go dancing originated in the early 1960s, by some accounts when women at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City began to get up on tables and dance the twist. Other accounts claim that go-go dancing originated at, and was named for, the very popular South L.A. rock club Whisky a Go Go which opened in January 1964. Many 1960s-era clubgoers wore miniskirts and knee-high, high-heeled boots, which eventually came to be called go-go boots, to night clubs.
  On 19 June 1964 "Big" Davy Rosenberg, the publicist at the Condor Club in San Francisco, gave Carol Doda, a 26 years old go-go dancer at the club, a monokini topless swimsuit designed by Rudi Gernreich. She performed topless that night, the first noted entertainer of the era to do so. The act was an instant success. Two months after she started her semi-nude performances, the rest of San Francisco's Broadway was topless, followed soon after by entertainers across America. In 2012, the city of San Antonio amended its city ordinances dealing with "sexually oriented businesses" redefining "nudity" to include "a state of dress that fails to completely and opaquely cover...the entire female breast". Whereas female dancers had previously been able to avoid being classified as "nude" by wearing pasties over their nipples, the new law required that they wear at minimum a bra or bikini top.
  Bikini bars are similar to go-go bars and striptease establishments except that the breasts and genital areas of the female performers or go-go dancers typically remain covered for the duration of their performance.
caption: Go-go dancers at the Lizard Lounge, Dallas, Texas (2011)
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