About

Bikini Bridge is a slang term used to describe a horizontal line that is formed on a woman's bikini bottoms as a result of the suspended gap between the bikini and the lower abdomen.

Origin

On February 26th, 2009, a Tumblr blog titled "Bikini Bridge" was launched, highlighting photographs of bikini bottoms stretched across women's hip bones (shown below).

Spread

On April 24th, 2009, Urban Dictionary^[3] user mormdav submitted an entry for the phrase "bikini bridge," defining the term as a bikini bottom stretched across protruding hip bones. On October 12th, 2010, the /r/bikinibridge^[2] subreddit was launched, featuring user-submitted photographs of thin women in bikini bottoms. On September 11th, 2012, MixedMartialArts forum member -FC- shared a compilation of bikini bridge photos. On September 13th, 2012, a Facebook^[10] page titled "Bikini Bridge" was created. On August 1st, 2013, the sports blog Barstool Sports^[13] highlighted several bikini bridge photographs.

Operation Bikini /b/ridge

On January 5th, 2014, 4chan members launched "Operation Bikini Bridge," in which bikini bridge photos were spread to promote the pose as "the next big thing" while simultaneously denouncing the fad as being an "unhealthy obsession" in social media circles centered around subjects like "thin privilege" and "fat shaming" with the hashtag #BikiniBridge2014.

On the same day, BuzzFeed^[8] highlighted a dozen of bikini bridge photos in the style of the "Just Girly Things" image macros in a post titled “12 Perks of Having a Bikini Bridge.” On the following day, Redditor rdwtoker submitted a post titled “Operation Bikini /b/ridge” to the /r/4chan^[4] subreddit, featuring an Imgur gallery containing photoshopped tweets of celebrities Katy Perry, Pope Francis and Justin Bieber promoting the bikini bridge (shown below).

On January 6th, the women’s fitness blog Blogilates^[7] published an article about the hashtag, which urged women not to base their beauty off of having a thigh gap and included several example photos taken from Instagram (shown below).

The next day, The Daily Mail^[6] published an article in which the bikini bridge is labeled as a “disturbing selfie fad” and compared to the “thigh gap,” a related slang term used to describe a visible gap between a woman's thighs while standing upright with both knees touching. Also on January 7th, several news sites reported about 4chan's involvement in the hoax, including The Daily Dot,^[11] Today^[12] and BuzzFeed.^[14] Within the first 48 hours, the hashtag #bikinibridge had been tweeted over 3,400 times according to the Twitter analytics site Topsy.^[5]

Search Interest

External References