Before there was a Super Bowl, Sports Illustrated found itself 50 years ago with nothing to put on the cover in January. An editor suggested shooting a beautiful model in a pretty place — beginning one of publishing’s sexiest traditions.
“It’s such a funny thing,” Tyra Banks tells The News. “Sports Illustrated is athletes and football and goals and home runs 11 months out of the year. Then the one issue that they dedicate to models is their most popular.”
PHOTOS: ICONIC SWIMSUIT MOMENTS
What Banks refers to as “funny,” others call one of the most iconic, valuable publishing brands: the annual SI Swimsuit Issue. In fact, it’s the single most profitable magazine franchise in the world.
Its ability to launch and sustain modeling careers is legendary — from Christie Brinkley and Heidi Klum to Kathy Ireland and Brooklyn Decker. Banks, by the way, became the Swimsuit Issue’s first black cover girl in 1996.
PHOTOS: SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT ISSUE
To commemorate five decades in business, “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful” arrives Tuesday, a massive tome of hotness through history. Every girl who’s ever appeared in a Swimsuit Issue is included in the book’s 300 pages. (Though some, like Elle Macpherson and Kate Upton, have more pages in the book than others.)
“Some say it’s exploitive to women,” Ireland tells The News. “But Sports Illustrated is a platform, and every woman is able to use that platform as she desires… Unlike other fashion books, Sports Illustrated presents looks and concepts that are attainable for any woman.”
PHOTOS: THESE SI SWIMSUIT PHOTOS ARE SIMPLY 'HEAVEN'
Ireland holds the record for the most Swimsuit Issue appearances — 12 consecutive years, with three covers. She also managed to parlay her modeling fame into a multibillion-dollar brand name on everything from clothing to furniture.
Perhaps her most famous cover, which is also included in the new book, is a 1994 “Dream Team” photograph of her with Rachel Hunter and Elle Macpherson. At the time, Ireland was pregnant with her son, who’s now 19 years old.
PHOTOS: CELEBRATING 2010 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT ISSUE
Steve Hoffman, who was the creative director of the Swimsuit Issue for 20 years, helped design “50 Years of Beautiful.” It was a massive archival project, he says, which required going back decades and contacting elderly photographers to see if they still had the negatives from those old SI swimsuit photo shoots.
“When you think of early years of Swimsuit Issues,” Hoffman says, “people didn’t know what it would become, so they didn’t save things like they do now. Negatives were sent back to photographers. For many years the photos were on slides.”
PHOTOS: SI SWIMSUIT MODELS PARTY IN SIN CITY
Archiving has obviously become a lot easier with digital photography, but Hoffman says they felt “duty bound” to dig up the old photographs from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s and include those models in the book as well. Many of the photos that made it into the new book were never published in the actual magazines, and are outtakes or just pictures that were not chosen at the time.
The result is a stupendous, and very heavy, collection of photographs. Some are funny. Some silly. Some very, very sexy.
RELATED: KATE UPTON SIZZLES AS SI'S COVER GIRL
The book begins with reminiscences from longtime SI staffers. Fred Smith, who was hired as an editor in 1954, before SI even had a name, recalls, “We tried to use [Swimsuit] models who looked like real people. We didn’t want to look like Vogue.”
The bulk of “50 Years of Beautiful” is then packed with photos of the girls themselves, which, let’s be honest, has always been the big draw. There’s a chapter about bodypainting, a feature introduced in 1999 when “SI’s editors decided it was the perfect time to radically rethink the swimsuit. Or, one might say, reject it altogether,” according to a line in the book.
Next up is a collection of photos of famous athletes in swimsuits, and their wives, also in bathing suits. Then there are humorous, zany poses and outtakes like Heidi Klum, topless with a monkey in Malaysia, and Israeli model Esti Ginzburg, screaming as an Indian snake charmer lays a viper on her belly.
Asked about her most memorable shoot, ’90s model Vendela Kirsebom recalled the time SI took her to a glacier in Alaska.
“We were actually on top of the glacier with a helicopter and husky dogs,” she says.
“It was amazing!”
jsilverman@nydailynews.com
No comments:
Post a Comment