 The bikini finally caught on , and 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 , though Funicello was barred from wearing Réard 's bikini unlike the other young females in the films . In 1965 , a woman told Time that it was " almost square " not to wear a bikini ; the magazine wrote two years later that " 65 % of the young set had already gone over " . Raquel Welch 's deer skin bikini in One Million Years B.C. , advertised as " mankind 's first bikini " , ( 1966 ) was later described as a " definitive look of the 1960s " . Her role wearing the leather bikini raised Welch to a fashion icon and the photo of her in the bikini became a best @-@ selling pinup poster . 
