The editors of the swimsuit issue have perfected a genteel notion of female sexuality. You might call it Minivan Cheesecake. That is, the magazine is just tasteful enough to be enjoyed comfortably by a middle-aged man who operates a minivan. This year’s crop of 18 supermodels would look right at home in a Subaru commercial. They never reveal anything more than a stray nipple—and then it’s tucked beneath a translucent swimsuit (Page 75) or body paint (Page 78). In return, the SI cameras maintain a discreet distance from the babes—none of the too-close-up shots you find in Playboy or Penthouse. The models seem to smile a lot morethan they do in the skin magazines, and they stop to pay tribute to inspirational heroes like Jane Goodall and Brett Favre. Why, there’s even a special treat for the kids: supermodel trading cards!
The family-room aesthetic was handed down by Andre Laguerre, a raffish Frenchman and ex-DeGaulle associate who edited Sports Illustrated from 1960to 1974. Laguerre, who believed that a good deal of all magazine business should be conducted from inside a bar, found himself with a minor editorial problem: He had no compelling sporting events to cover during the winter months. In 1964, he had a brainstorm: He would supplement sport with skin. Laguerre summoned a young fashion reporter named Jule Campbell to his office and laid down the intellectual roots of the issue. He asked Campbell, “How would you like to go to some beautiful place and put a pretty girl on the cover?”
The first swimsuit issue, published earlier that year, hadn’t been much to look at. Because the models were still sharing space with the athletes—they would achieve special-issue status in 1997—they were only granted five pages. The inaugural cover model, Babette March, was photographed standing in the surf with a finger curled under her nose, as if she’d just inhaled two pints of saltwater. But Jule Campbell, who would soon become one of the most powerful women in modeling, remade the swimsuit issue into a juggernaut. She ditched the reigning archetype of female beauty—epitomized by the model Twiggy—for California women who were “bigger and healthier.” She began printing her model’s nameswith their photos—a rare practice at the time—which made them into house brands and ushered in a new era of supermodeldom.