Two-Pièce de Résistance: Estelle Lefebure, 1993

Score another point for Team Shiny.

Photo: Paul Lange

There are two photos of Estelle I love equally, this gold one and the green one I featured here. I think this one is fun to contemplate from a composition standpoint.

I’ve shared some photos lately where the model is either enhanced by or contrasting with the background. This one is almost monochromatic. The photo is made up entirely of various shades of tan. Estelle stands out by dint of the shiny curves of her swimsuit and the soft smoothness of her skin, otherwise it’s a “polar bear in a snowstorm” joke come to life.

She stands statuesque in what we can imagine is a hostile, windswept environment where a beautiful girl pines in sexy anguish. She looks a bit like a damsel on the cover of a romance novel. You almost expect her to lay the back of her wrist against her forehead in melodramatic woe.

Anyway, that’s my fantasy about this shot. To others, it may simply be a swimsuit girl lounging near a beach just out of view. But it’s always seemed more dramatic to me.

Personal history: When I was in college, I had this page neatly sliced out of the magazine and hanging on a shelving unit in my dorm room. Well, unbeknownst to me, the dorm started replacing the shelving units in all the rooms, so one day I got home from class to find a new shelf above my desk, with this page gently removed and replaced upon it.

I always thought that was very considerate of the contractors.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Stacey Williams, 1997

One feature that shows up in this series a lot: shiny swimsuits.

Photo: Walter Iooss Jr

Is it some primal attraction to reflections? Is it the way the glare seems to focus on points of the model’s body like a magnifying glass? Is it the subtle shimmers that help outline the contours of the curves?

Who knows? I like shiny swimsuits, and I’m obviously not alone, because there are a ton of them. This wasn’t even the only shiny Stacey pic in the running for this post.

In any case, I very much disfruto this image. It’s a great representative from the all-bikini 1997 issue — the bikini is perfect, and not least of all because Stacey is occupying it.

Stacey has so many beautiful shots. Usually she’s smiling warmly or leveling those languid, hypnotic eyes at us. But here she’s gazing off, momentarily oblivious in her own world, fingertip to mouth, clearly fantasizing about some intensely pleasurable activity, like maybe drinking a Coke.

The pose is a variation on the classic Buddha pose, but her top leg is pulled up a little, like she’s absently writhing, luxuriating at the feel of her own skin-on-skin.

It’s an almost unforgivably gorgeous photo of one of the all-time greats.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Karen Mulder, 1997

I've always thought this photo of Karen was lovely.

Photo: André Rau

It makes me stop and stare every time I come across it.

It’s a very Grace Kelly look, which makes sense because the shoot was in Monaco. SI has done other “retro” themes, like Laetitia Casta’s “history of swimwear” shoot in 2000 and Heidi Klum’s “Varga girl” bodypainting in 2006.

Karen's pic feels a little different. Her swimsuit isn't particularly retro, but all the other visual elements are: the hair, the makeup, the coy pose, the peaches-and-cream smirk. Her spread in this issue told kind of a celebrity story, in which she’s strolling through her rarefied lifestyle, surrounded by reporters and pampered dogs and helicopters.

I know nothing about photography, but I think it has a different look from most swimsuit shoots. They used fashion photographer André Rau, and I believe this is his only shoot for SI, so they were going for a specific sheen.


Karen has a darker and more bizarre connection to Grace Kelly and Monaco, which I won’t get into, but suffice it to say Karen has had some darkness in her life. It’s hard to reconcile that darkness with such a pretty, charming, well-coifed image.

I’m reminded of this shot from Walter Iooss’s “Heaven” book. 

It’s Petra Nemcova, shot in Vietnam for the 2003 issue. Iooss has this to say about the photo:

“This is a picture I never really looked at until Petra nearly drowned in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster almost two years after we visited Vietnam. It’s not a happy or sexy image by any means but there is something telling to it considering what later happened to her. Her history makes this picture a little more interesting.”

I disagree on one point — I think this is a very sexy image. But it’s also somber, imbued by tragedy with more weight.

I think it’s useful to be reminded that a lot of turmoil can exist beneath the most serene photo. We’re looking at a very controlled, final image.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Heidi Klum, 1998

Wow, the sheer Heidi Klumness of this photo.

Photo: Robert Erdmann

I can wax poetic about a lot of the shots I’m sharing lately, but this one is just plain old in-your-face hotness. Nothing subtle about it.

The translucent top, the hint of underboob, the bikini bottom slipped aside to reveal the tanlines from another bikini bottom. It’s the same over-the-top mood as her Halloween costumes.

Heidi has a lot of sweet, wholesome shots in her tenure with SI, but this isn’t one of them. She’s presenting everything she has and boldly meeting your gaze as she does it.

Here’s a slightly different pose from somewhere …

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Paulina Porizkova, 1986

This photo is a landmark in my early fascination with the female body.

Photo: Brian Lanker

I was in thrall to that classic Buddha-style bathing-beauty pose. I memorized the placement of each tiny, round, plastic sequin on that bikini.

There’s a fun contradiction in this photo. Paulina is on a Polynesian island, wearing a sparkly and brightly colored swimsuit, lounging on a canoe, with a flower in her hair. You’d expect the girl in this situation to be the type of bubbly blonde you’d find on a postcard or a Hawaiian shirt.

But instead, there’s Paulina, of the Eastern European strain of swimsuit models, with her pensive and almost gloomy expression. Even when Paulina smiled, it was subtle and mysterious instead of sunny and inviting.

More recently, she’s all big, toothy smiles …

… but back then, she added a layer of depth and darkness to what I found appealing in those early years, laying the groundwork for my tastes to this day.

This is a better quality scan, but it has the page split.

SI: The world is ending. Go ahead and open up your vault to all your high-quality photos. You’re sitting on so much potential joy.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Kathy Ireland, 1985

I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong about Kathy Ireland.

Photo: Brian Lanker

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like she was overrated. Gorgeous, obviously, but in an era that included Elle and Paulina, I didn’t see why Kathy was the one who got marriage proposals from entire fraternities in the Letters section of Sports Illustrated.

I don’t know if it’s maturity or nostalgia or what, but I’m coming around. She had some magnificent photos in her long career with the magazine.


This was the honest-to-goodness centerfold of my first-ever swimsuit issue. In my youth, that word, centerfold, was bandied about as some kind of sacred term, something to do with naked ladies but I wasn’t sure what.

But then this magazine arrived at my house, thanks to my dad’s subscription, and I finally understood it. One horizontal photo, two uninterrupted pages. With some careful staple-manipulation, she could be removed in a single sheet and affixed to your bedroom wall with nothing but a few tiny holes marring her.

The caption compares her to the Sphinx, and it fits. Not just the pose itself, with her forearms resting on the sand below, but also the inscrutable and hypnotic eyes meeting your gaze.

One notable difference from the Sphinx: Kathy tilts her pelvis up a little to reveal a glorious corduroy string bikini bottom, a gesture that would have made my eleven-year-old head swim.

This photo is the best version of this pic floating around online. It’s not scanned from the magazine, but from one of the “collections” SI has put out, so she doesn’t have the crease through her right shoulder.

It’s worth noting that a variant of this shot appeared in the subsequent 1986 calendar, and it’s just as wonderful.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Stephanie Seymour, 1989

Thongs are pretty amazing.

Photo: Marc Hispard

G-strings, too. They are basically an admission that we, as a society, have decided that naked butts are a-okay.

This over-the-counter girlie magazine, with the word “swimsuit” in the title, finds innovative ways to tease at — but conceal — the other forbidden areas of the body. Angles of poses, backlighting, fabric (even if it’s occasionally translucent).

But what, really, is the difference between an ass in a thong and an ass out of a thong?

One thing I’ll say about Stephanie: She has a lot of great shots. Possibly the highest batting average of any model who never got a cover. She’s just incredible. I finally chose to feature this lovely photograph.

This bikini was not in the 1989 25th Anniversary issue of the magazine. We had to wait until the 1990 desk calendar — the first one SI ever put out — to find this photo waiting for us during the week of August 26. (As it happens, Stephanie was on the cover of that desk calendar.)

And thank goodness for those calendars. In the days before each model got dozens of online photos, there were pics like this that would have disappeared if not for the 52-week bonus collection SI put out later each year.


Stephanie’s front is gently sun-kissed in this shot. But her back — where we are — is in shadow. She turns and looks at us over her shoulder, but this isn’t quite a Grable pose because she’s not smiling. She’s also not glowering. It’s a nearly expressionless glance that we’re allowed to put our own meaning to.

For me, it’s that that “permission” dynamic I find so joyful — “I know you’re looking, and I don’t blame you. Knock yourself out. I’ll just go back to gazing out at the ocean now.”


I read an article once in some men’s magazine, probably at the end of 1999. The topic was something like “The 50 Greatest Inventions of the Twentieth Century.” One of them was panties.

An observation from that article was that a woman wearing only panties is somehow more naked than she is when she’s actually naked.

The thong, I think, has that effect. It covers nothing, but its presence enhances nevertheless. It’s a frame, it’s an arrow, it’s the optical illusion of two profiles forming a vase. Its presence emphasizes its absence.

And that’s the difference between an ass in a thong and an ass out of a thong.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Coco Mitchell, 1986

Every time I see an SI pic of a model with a rainbow, I think “Hey, I should do a rainbow-themed post!” Unfortunately, I promptly forget to keep track of the photo. So while I know there are a lot of swimsuit-girl-and-rainbow photos out there, I don’t have a running list.

But Coco here deserves a mention on her own merits.

I wish there was a sharp online photo of this shot. I put this together in Photoshop from the scans at the SI Archive.

Photo: Brian Lanker

This is a much better file, but it has that pesky Getty watermark.

In any case, Coco, who has never been featured on this blog before, stands to her mid-thighs in a river in front of a scene that would be breathtaking even without the beautiful, swimsuit-clad woman in the foreground.

The last photo I shared featured a warm Kate Upton, specifically positioned to contrast with her icy surroundings. This two-page spread, on the other hand, lets the model and her backdrop enhance each other. Coco’s Mondrian-esque monokini mirrors the glorious rainbow on the opposite page.

This was from only the second swimsuit issue I ever got my hands on, and it hit my sweet spot. Coco’s solid curves and high-cut suit and one-thigh-crossed-in-front-of-the-other pose met my teenaged eyes just right.

Weirdly, the photo also inspires some residual sadness in me. It was the last picture in the swimsuit spread that year, and — as foreign a concept as this is today — I used to flip through the pages in order. This pic of Coco meant that the next page would not show me fabulous babes, but rather this guy:

This was way back in the day when the swimsuit issue arrived enveloped within a regular issue of Sports Illustrated, meaning that actual sports stories took up valuable space in my girlie magazine. The story immediately following the swimsuit section was usually about some athletic event in the country where the shoot took place that year, and 1986 introduced us to the “Tiurai” festival in Tahiti, with its spirited rock-lifting competitions.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Kate Upton, 2013

I think Antarctica is the best shoot Kate gave us.

Photo: Derek Kettela

The hair, the pose, the gaze, the cushions — this photo is pure, glorious cheesecake.

Against a backdrop of icy blue and white and black, Kate is a splash of warmth, an inviting contrast to the foreboding landscape. She inspires thoughts of intimacy — why are you and Kate on this boat at the bottom of the world?

The wispy fur bikini is a nice touch. It’s a parody of warm clothing. It’s in line with the fun visual irony of pinups, like a girl at a construction site wearing jeans shorts and a bikini top — and a safety helmet. Or a lady in a kitchen wearing nothing but an apron. The “fur” is environment-appropriate, but only a prop that emphasizes how little she’s actually wearing.

For me, Kate’s 2013 appearance earned her a place in the Pantheon of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Elle Macpherson, 1988

The phrase “golden triangle” refers to a range of things. Several geographical locations, a couple cultural phenomena, some sort of math thing.

Despite its range of meanings, it doesn’t come up in everyday conversation very often. But whenever I hear it, I think of this Elle Macpherson photo.

Photo: Marc Hispard

That triangle has entranced me for decades. This might be the most gorgeous photo in a 1988 issue that was above average in gorgeousness.

This behind-the-scenes shot is enlightening.

It reveals how expertly the artifice is assembled to create a great swimsuit pic. Elle isn’t a sex goddess deep in some lush jungle, glistening with perspiration and rain, miles from civilization. She’s a girl in her mid-20s, getting splashed with a bit of water, in a clearing next to some kind of picnic venue.

But when the time comes, the hair descends and the hips tilt and the eyes glower. The shot snaps into place.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Rebecca Romijn, 1996

This is, obviously, not the skimpiest swimsuit Rebecca has worn in SI.

Photo: Marco Glaviano

In fact, I’m not even sure it’s a swimsuit. It covers the vast majority of her body. Long sleeves, long legs. If not for the cleavage-window, this would almost look like a Halima Aden burkini.

And I’d argue that her face, not her body, is the focal point.

But what a face. Such an intense, symmetrical face. It’s no wonder she was cast to play a villainess in a comic book movie. Even with her disheveled, damp hair, she’s intensely perfect.

The suit is blue, and the shimmering sand that surrounds her is blue, which has the effect of popping those gorgeous irises like a couple of laser beams.

It’s a photo that inspires me to stop and appreciate, and I think that’s what I’m trying to highlight with these posts.

Two-Pièce de Résistance: Cheryl Tiegs, 1983

I’ve mentioned that the huge number of photos (40+) we get of each model nowadays is a double-edged sword. It’s great to have the quantity, but it’s harder to find that one iconic shot that comes from having to select one picture of one girl in one swimsuit.

I thought I’d pay homage to some of my favorite shots, those I’d consider “classics.” Most, if not all, have been featured on the blog before, but I’ve been feeling nostalgic, and I have an urge to shake my head free of the Larger Questions that have started attaching themselves to this simple girlie mag.

They won’t all be bikinis, but the title “Two-Pièce de Résistance” was just too irresistible.

• • •

I’ve always been partial to this photo of Cheryl.

Photo: Walter Iooss Jr.

 

I think part of the reason is its timelessness. Cheryl is beautiful, but because of certain signifiers — hair, swimsuit style, photography — she usually seems rooted in the 70s. Since that was before my puberty, I have to admit that my love for her photos sometimes feels like an appreciation for museum pieces.

But this shot is gorgeous in any decade.

Those big, smoky eyes; that Mona Lisa smirk; that clingy wet one-piece. For my money, it's a sexier shot than her landmark fishnet photo.

But let us pay respect to the fishnet, nevertheless.