"Bikiniarze" (singular: "bikiniarz") was a Polish subculture that emerged in the late 1940s. Named after the Bikini atoll because of colorful, hand painted neckties with palms and nude women; sometimes depicting a mushroom cloud over a tropical island.
Jacek Kuroń wrote:
"Bikiniarze - said we ZMP (Union of Polish Youth) members - are adopting the "American way of life", and all they were really trying to do was to simply dress, comb their hair and dance just like young people in the US did.
Boys wore colorful plaid shirts, with an undershirt sticking out, also colorful, only striped. The colors could bite each other, although there were various fashionable sets: chives on scrambled eggs, or green on yellow, for example. The scarf was also terribly American, appropriately colored, or a tie, obligatory very wide, basically hand-painted. Particularly fashionable were with an island and a palm tree, under the palm tree a naked girl, often above this appeared kind of mushroom (supposedly atomic), because it was supposed to be a Bikini atoll. Hence, by the way, the name - bikiniarze.
Over the shirt, a suitably wide, padded jacket of homespun or, less often, velvet. Tight pants, very narrow at the ankle, cropped so that you can see the striped, colorful socks. High boots on a thick sole made of rubber. The girls wore narrow skirts with a long zipper on the side.
Bikiniarze liked jazz, danced boogie-woogie or, rather, anything fast in the boogie-woogie-like style. Plus gender-appropriate hairstyles, which I won't undertake to describe here."
twojahistoria.pl/2018/02/11/kim-byli-bikiniarze/
Enamoured with American culture bikiniarze were equivalent to similar styles in other countries like the British "teddy boys" or Soviet "stilyagi".
Clips come from two episodes of the Polish Film Chronicle:
17/53, "Operator was podpatrzył"
repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=en/node/7499
3/53, "Oto Ameryka"
repozytorium.fn.org.pl/?q=en/node/7255
#prl #newsreel #jazz #1950s