Sports Illustrated

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Charlie Bevis

Laguerre also pioneered the swimsuit issue in 1964. The original concept was as a "sunshine issue" in the bleak winter days of late January. It was designed to bridge the gap between the New Year's Day college bowl games to the start of baseball spring training in early March, in the years when basketball, either pro or college, had little national following. What might have been just a single issue article blossomed into an annual event, with the commotion about the issue. It brightened some people's winter, but outraged others. The issue went "from moral outrage to hallowed tradition in only one generation," Deford wrote in his 1989 retrospective on the swimsuit issue, "How It All Began."

To take charge of the swimsuit issue, Laguerre tapped Jule Campbell. After fashion model Babette March graced the 1964 initial cover, Campbell used unknown women with "natural" or "healthy" looks instead of the gaunt high fashion look. As the issue gained popularity, Campbell blended known faces with her "healthy" look. She even used the models' names in photo captions, providing a degree of identity that fashion magazines did not at the time. This helped to accelerate the career of Cheryl Tiegs, who appeared on the cover of the 1970 swimsuit issue, and some say, helped to usher in the supermodel era. Other famous models that appeared early in their careers on the cover of the swimsuit issue were Christie Brinkley (1979), Elle MacPherson (1986), and Kathy Ireland (1989).

As the issue's swimsuits became skimpier, the battlefield changed from moral corruption of youth to sexism. "Women should stop screaming about that one issue and start screaming that SI doesn't carry enough women's sports. That's sexism," tennis star Billie Jean King said. The debate came to a head with the 1978 issue, when Iooss photographed Tiegs wearing a fishnet swimsuit. When dry, the suit was sensual but not revealing in the upper body area. Tiegs, however, had dipped into the water and the wetness created an exceptionally provocative pose, leaving nothing to the viewer's imagination. The picture caused a furor, eliciting more letters and canceled subscriptions in the history of the swimsuit issue. But it was a defining moment for both the swimsuit issue and the supermodel industry. "If there was any doubt before that modeling was, like everything else, about to lose its virginity (or illusion of virginity) in the 70s, the January 1978 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue put an end to it," Stephen Fried wrote in Thing of Beauty. "The uproar caused by one picture of Cheryl Tiegs reinforced the new truth that the way straight men perceived fashion models would determine the future of the business." "It's a sweet little picture, that's it," Tiegs told Michael Gross, author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. Gross went on to write, "But in fact, it was a major coup, adding the powerful appeal of the pinup picture to modeling's arsenal of promotional gimmicks."

As the swimsuit issue gained popularity, SI stepped up its marketing of the issue in the mid-1980s by introducing the swimsuit calendar and touting the models on the talk show circuit before the issue hit the newsstand. The 1986 issue with MacPherson on the cover sold 1.2 million copies at the newsstand, up from just 300,000 in 1983. The 25th anniversary issue in 1989 sold 2.7 million single copies. Newsstand sales by 1996 had slumped back to 1986 levels, a reflection of the changing dynamics in sports journalism.