Two-Pièce de Résistance: Ashley Richardson, 1991

I know she’s the Queen of the One-Piece, but …

Photo: Walter Iooss Jr.

… this is a perfect bikini pic.

It’s actually remarkably similar to Karen Mulder’s shot from six years later. Blonde bombshell, swervy pose, turquoise bikini. I guess I have a “type.”

But Ashley’s pose is more presentational. Here’s a head-on look at her magnificent, voluptuous body. A platonic ideal of a bikini top and bottom, laid out upon Ashley for our enjoyment.

For me, there’s a kind of silliness to the pose as well. The tousled hair, the pressed-together thighs, the pouty lips aimed off to the heavens … It’s like she’s doing a parody of a sexy pose, “playing at” being a bathing beauty.

When you watch Ashley in her making-of videos, she clearly has a sense of humor. She goofs around, cracks jokes, and seems to relish the bizarreness of what she’s doing: prancing through the snow in a swimsuit, straddling a fence in a swimsuit, lathering soap bubbles on her chest while thigh-deep in a jacuzzi in a swimsuit, etc.

In a lot of behind-the-scenes SI videos, a girl will pull an exaggerated, silly “sexy” move, like winking at the camera or wriggling her hips or blowing a kiss. The wonderful thing is, their cartoonish, ironic sexiness still comes across as sexy. They can’t escape it, no matter how corny they try to make it.