One-Piece Wednesday: Judit Masco, 1990

One-Piece Wednesday: Stacey Williams, 1993

I love Stacey Williams.

The first time I laid eyes on her, in the 1992 issue, I was seduced by her idealized girl-next-doorness: freckles, turned-up nose, languid brown eyes. She’s in my top five of all time, possibly my favorite model of the 90s.

This photo is from 1993, the “America First” issue, on Mackinac Island.

Rebus Greetings

Exquisite Pairs

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until -- “My God,” says a second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... “Look, look!” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”
@juliephenderson tweeted this photo a few weeks ago of her and Irina Shayk:Perhaps this means there will be a nice twosome photo shoot?

SI used to do it all the time, but they’ve drifted away from it recently. As the above Tom Stoppard quote touches on, there’s something to be said for two being a more magical number than three (or more).

One photo of, say, Kathy Ireland? Wonderful.One photo of Elle Macpherson? Magnificent.Put the two of them together in a pool? You have the single greatest photograph ever taken.So it follows that if you threw in Rachel Hunter, a woman easily gorgeous enough to hold company with Elle and Kathy, the hotness should continue growing exponentially, right?Well…

It doesn’t. I am not sure why. Maybe you just don’t know where to focus. Maybe the bodies all get in the way of each other. Maybe it’s the difference between the viewer contemplating a ménage à trois (something unlikely but possible) and contemplating an all-out orgy (pure fantasy, never gonna happen).

Reviews were mixed of the 1994 cover, judging from the letters section of the March 14 issue. Rick Duttenhofer of Boca Raton writes, “What a beautiful cover. Good things certainly come in threes.” But Jack Scarangella of New Rochelle retorts, “More is not necessarily better.”

(Philip W. Shoemaker of Raleigh writes, “The women on your cover are beautiful, but Kathy Ireland and Rachel Hunter are in awkward poses that are uncomplimentary to their beauty.” What you and I know, and Philip W. Shoemaker did not, is that Kathy and Rachel were both pregnant. For what it’s worth, I disagree with Phil about Rachel. I think she looks gorgeous. Kathy does look pale, and she spent the whole issue covering her stomach.)

The tipping point is between two and three. Some great pairings have sprung up over the years.Even a couple of covers. Twin sisters Yvette and Yvonne Sylvander in 1976:…and, twenty years later, polar opposites Valeria Mazza and Tyra Banks:(Walter Iooss, in his book Heaven, shares journal entries from his swimsuit shoots. He wrote this about Valeria and Tyra in South Africa: “Shoot (sic) what could be the cover of the issue. Tyra + Valaria (sic) in leapord (sic) bikinis on the beach. B+W girls.” The man is paid to take pictures, not win spelling bees.)

But tip over into three, and it gets awkward. This was the centerfold of the 1994 issue. Veronica Blume, Rebecca Romijn, and Judit Masco look like they’re watching a child perform a magic trick just off camera.
1992. Ashley Richardson, Shana Zadrick, and Vendela. Those three classic poses: leaping, sunbathing, winking.
1990. Judit Masco, Kathy Ireland, and Akure Wall act out some half-assed cheerleader carwash fantasy sequence.
1989. This is particularly egregious because Rachel Hunter (on the right) is clearly not wearing a thong. She’s been asked to stuff a traditional bikini bottom into the cleft of her buttocks to match the suits of Stephanie Seymour and Maria von Hartz. If it were just her, or just the other two, no such decision would have been made.
And then there are the massive group shots, where you cram models into the frame like college kids into a phone booth. These are for special occasions, like celebrating your 40th anniversary with a “greatest hits” collection:…or showing off twenty years’ worth of cover models:…or realizing that one out of every three Brazilians is a bikini girl:All of these are sexier in theory than in practice. A wall of bikinis will put a smile on your face that there are so many beautiful women in the world. But it kind of becomes wallpaper after that. One or two girls—you’ve got something to concentrate on. So that pic of Julie and Irina is promis—

Uh-oh.I believe this pic was tweeted by MJ Day. The one on the left, if we are to judge by the color of the bikini, is Julie. On the right: that looks like Irina’s face.

Whose butt is in the middle?

Well, at least her suit isn’t stuffed up into it. I guess we’ll find out in February.

Well, It’s a One-Piece

The Swimsuit Issue’s Facebook page recently put up this sneak preview of 2011’s bodypainting excursion. Here’s the mystery model:And, um…

Hm.

I love a sneak preview, but sometimes it’s better to wait until the cookies are done baking. This looks like a shot taken at a sanatorium during some kind of doomsday plague outbreak.

Let’s cleanse the palate (no pun intended) with a finished product: another painted one-piece, possibly the Platonic ideal of an SI bodypainting pic. Marisa Miller, 2004.And just for fun, here’s Molly Sims having somehow called that swimsuit into existence.
By the way, when SI posted the preview work-in-progress, someone commented that they could see nipple and asked if it was legal. What do you know, the picture seems to have disappeared.

How Do Ya Like Them Apples?

I recently got myself a copy of Heaven, the collection of Walter Iooss swimsuit photography.

It’s a beautiful book, and one I’d like to get into more deeply at another time. But one thing it has brought to my attention is the existence of a model named Apollonia van Ravenstein.With a name like that, you have to become a model or a supervillain. She opted for the former, appearing in the 1979 issue with her wavy brown tresses and massageable curves.Apparently she was pretty big in the 70s, and her friends called her “Apples.”

In Defense of the One-Piece

The bikini gets a lot of press.That makes sense. The swimsuit issue is about scantily clad women. It follows that skimpier is better. Ergo, bikinis are better that one-pieces. QED.

The bikini is the vast majority of suits featured in any recent issue. The 1997 issue was exclusively dedicated to bikinis (an honor that will never be bestowed on one-piecers). There may even be a mild twinge of disappointment when you turn the page and see a girl in a one-piece. “What,” you might ask, “is this fully dressed woman doing in my swimsuit issue?”

But hold on a second.

The one-piece has a charm to it, and not just as a throwback to a more innocent time. More fabric means more surface area, creating a sheath over the model’s body. It’s fun to allow your eyes to caress that landscape—often more coverage means more emphasis on the girl’s angles and curves.

When I hear the word “swimsuit,” a one-piece is what springs to mind. It’s a curvaceous, form-fitting word. And let’s not forget that Elle Macpherson, my favorite model of all time, wore a one-piece on all three of her consecutive covers from 1986-1988.Betty Grable. Farrah Fawcett. Bo Derek. Our own Cheryl Tiegs. A who’s-who of iconic one-piece swimsuit imagery.So in the interest of promoting this much-maligned article of clothing, this also-ran of the swimsuit issue, I hereby introduce One-Piece Wednesday.

On Wednesdays (Every Wednesday? One Wednesday a month? Who knows?) I will celebrate beautiful SI models in one-piece swimsuits. Let’s keep the one-piece from being second fiddle.

(And no, a topless bikini does not count as a one-piece.)

The Crotch Shot Heard 'Round the World

Lindsey Vonn has posed for ESPN The Magazine dressed, for some reason, as Sharon Stone from "Basic Instinct."Making her absolutely the first second woman in the last ten years to pose in a swimsuit for Sports Illustrated AND disguised as Catherine Tramell for another magazine.

Behold, Heidi Klum in GQ, 2002.For reference, here's the real deal.(What, do they not make this model of chair anymore?)

How Did I Miss This Story?

Jessica White was arrested for assault last month.

Jessica White is awesome. While other models have come and gone, she has quietly become a swimsuit veteran, appearing in seven issues over eight years (2003-2005 and 2007-2010). That’s longer than any current model. (Not a single one of Jessica’s fellow models from 2003—or 2004—appeared in 2010. The next year to feature any current girls was 2005, which brought us Daniella Sarahyba and Anne V.)

In the process, she’s been in no fewer than three bodypainting scenarios.
2004
2005
2009
It’s almost jarring to go back and look through some older pics, flipping through the likes of Audrey Quock and Isabeli Fontana and May Andersen and Melissa Keller, thinking that 2003 and 2004 were ancient history, and suddenly there’s a picture of Jessica White, looking incredibly young:



But I have to say, I think she’s sexier now.
Damn.
She’s lost the girlishness. This is a woman.
Damn.
She also was one of the Triumvirate of Jessicas in 2009, along with Gomes and Hart.

Here are the other two, safely contained in one photo from Complex.com, so as not to inspire White’s wrath by pulling too much focus.Because you don’t want to be on the receiving end of a beatdown from—wait a second.

Look at those arms.How could “lacerations, swelling and substantial pain” come from those skinny breadsticks Jessica is using as arms?

The defense rests, your honor.

Vote Hilary in 2011

The swimsuit issue Facebook page made a big deal the other day about revealing who one of the 2011 models would be. Readers were invited to guess at who she was based on this photo:
Later, the answer was revealed: Hilary Rhoda:
It will be her third year, and I’m happy she’s back. She’s gorgeous. She’s a worthy successor to that Carol Alt dark-hair-blue-eyes look.Gosh.
She also has something else to recommend her. And it isn’t just the fact that her name looks like someone tried to spell the name of the Secretary of State and got bored halfway through.

I have a thing for women with their legs together. I can’t fully explain it, but I think it has something to do with how feminine a pose it is. I particularly like when a woman is standing with her legs straight and crossed over each other.

It’s a pose that Hilary has perfected.I fully expect to see more of this pose come February.
“The power is yours Hilary. Use it wisely.”