I’m beginning to think I’ve been wrong about Kathy Ireland.
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| 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.
My first year as a Swimsuit Issue reader was 1989, Kathy's first and most iconic cover. Like you though, she was not my favorite model (although I'll note that despite her 1989 cover, she only had a few photos in the body of that issue). But like you, I've come to appreciate Kathy more and more over time.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to try to explain Kathy's curiously strong grassroots fan base in the 1980s, here would be my top hypotheses:
1) Kathy was American, and she looked American. It's hard to explain, but Europeans don't have that kind of face. She even "posed" American: Always a bit more conservative, more wholesome, more girl-next-door. American SI readers were much more straightforwardly and publicly patriotic back in the Reagan era—it was a simpler time I guess, for better or worse.
2) Unlike all but a few models, Kathy made SI and its male fan base the foundation and the mainstay of her career. She was in it every year without fail, and she didn't go back and forth between the worlds of high fashion and the worlds of swimsuit modeling.
3) I'm pretty sure Kathy had the longest consecutive streak of "SI appearances without a cover" of any model. Therefore a certain tension built up year after year in her fan base: "Why no cover? Why no cover? Why no cover?" Her fan base may not actually have been the largest, but it was certainly the most frustrated and felt the most cheated. Therefore it became much more vocal in her support, and the suits at SI were happy to play along and hype it up until the eventual (spectacularly profitable for all concerned) payoff of the 1989 cover.
4) This is something I've only come to appreciate over time, but out of all the models Kathy had the most "accessibly perfect" body. She was neither short nor tall, she didn't have one particularly crazy body part (see Stephanie Seymour in the previous post). She was not obviously "skinny" in the manner of a high-fashion model who poses in a swimsuit once a year (like Paulina), nor was she obviously "athletic" in the manner of Kelly Emberg for instance.
Instead, Kathy had the type of body that is somehow very appealing and recognizable to many Americans. It is the body of the girl who was once the best 11-year soccer player (or basketball player, or swimmer) in her affluent suburb, and who grew up to become the "WHAT HAPPENED TO LITTLE KATHY?!" young woman. You've posted the photo of Kathy on a yellow bicycle, and perhaps also the one of her playing softball—both of those illustrate what I'm trying to say.
Anyway, great post as usual, and great find on the photos.
I like your thinking on Kathy. #4 sounds very likely — she's the center of a Venn diagram, so that Elle fans, Paulina fans, and Kelly fans all had room for her.
ReplyDeleteKathy straddles the two eras of SI under Jule. The early years of California girls which transitioned into the SI Supermodel era of the 80s and beyond. She wasn't high fashion, but she was healthy and fit. I really think it was the eyes that drew people in though. Big eyes framed by big brows at the time.
ReplyDeleteI remember when the videos first came out and it was interesting to see how different Kathy seemed from the other girls. She seemed to move slower, just subtle changes as the camera clicked along. She had a demure quality to her. My favorite pic of her was her in the white bikini in 84. She's topless yet still looked totally innocent.
Thanks for this post. Reminds of happier times.
This is the first Anonymous commenter, back for more. The second Anonymous commenter makes an excellent point about how Kathy straddles two eras of SI. And that reminds me that this is another case where even minor age differences between SI readers—to be blunt, the year in which you turned 11 and therefore discovered the SI Swimsuit issue—can be make a huge difference in how you perceive things:
ReplyDeleteI turned 11 in 1989, well into the supercharged, Supermodel era, and in that context Kathy seemed more or less like one of the pack. But Kathy's first appearance in SI was in 1984. I don't wish to insult or accuse anyone personally but 1984 was still the "Cocaine Years" of the modeling industry as a whole (I still remember Len Bias' death two years later)—everyone was very skinny, very high-fashion, very New York/Paris, very rock-and-roll, and Jule basically had to pull off a miracle every year to produce a swimsuit magazine for middle America.
In THAT context, Kathy Ireland must have stood out from the pack as a model who was completely different, completely special. And that's when her legendary fan base was born—not in 1989. So anyone who turned 11 during 1984-1987 would have had a much different opinion of Kathy than Swimsuitologist and I did.
Thanks for a great comment.
This is kind of a longshot, but I'm trying to find video online of Kathy from the 1992 swimsuit issue. This was her last year on the cover, and I can find footage of other models that year, but not hers! (There used to be some on youtube, but it's not there anymore).. any chance you know where to find it?
ReplyDeleteSorry, other than the usual YouTube searches, I don't know where to find the Kathy video you're looking for. I wonder if some Kathy fanpage or Bellazon thread would have some leads...
ReplyDelete