Miss World
beauty contest
Miss World is the oldest existing international beauty pageant. It was created in the United Kingdom by Eric Morley in 1951. Since his death in 2000, Morley's widow, Julia Morley, has chaired the pageant. Along with Miss Universe, Miss International, and Miss Earth, it is one of the Big Four beauty pageants.
The current Miss World is Joheirry Mola of the Dominican Republic, who was crowned on 5 September 2026 in Nha Trang, Vietnam.
History
20th century
In 1951, Eric Morley organised a bikini contest as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations that he called the Festival Bikini Contest. The event was popular with the press, which dubbed it "Miss World". The swimsuit competition was intended as a promotion for the bikini, which had only recently been introduced to the market and was still widely regarded as immodest. When the 1951 Miss World pageant winner, Kerstin "Kiki" Hakansson from Sweden, was crowned in a bikini, it added to the controversy.
The pageant was originally planned as a Pageant for the Festival of Britain, but Morley decided to make the Miss World pageant annual.
The public source identifies “Miss World” as beauty contest. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Miss, World and beauty.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q173402. VIAF identifies the subject as 139777538. The Library of Congress control number is n2007065452. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 2000 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Miss World” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.