It must be working for Sports Illustrated. The magazine expects to sell 4.8 million copies of its annual Swimsuit Issue, which went on sale today. Time Inc. claims it is the most-read issue of any magazine in the world.
From a fashion spread in SI more than 40 years ago, the Swimsuit Issue has become a multi-platform franchise of DVDs, Internet content and corporate tie-ins. Swimsuit videos are even for sale on iTunes.
Still, the Swimsuit Issue can feel like a throwback. Given the glut of men’s magazines packed with pictures of mostly naked women, not to mention the Internet and cable TV, how does a normally un-sexy sports magazine manage to make a splash with another spread of women in bathing suits?
“That’s the hardest part of the job, trying to come up with surprises,” says editor Diane Smith. Smith works on the Swimsuit Issue full-time, year-round, a job she’s held for eight years. She was in the middle of a media blitz this week, hyping the magazine on dozens of local TV morning shows, among other places.
For the 2006 cover, the magazine chose a photo of eight topless (but strategically covered) past Swimsuit Issue cover models, photographed by Raphael Mazzucco in the Bahamas. The rest of the magazine follows the standard babes-on-the-beach formula, with models in various states of undress and surrounded by exotic props.
In one picture, model Molly Sims wears a diamond-studded suit described as “The $30 Million Bikini.” In another, Noemie Lenoir poses with a Jaguar (the car) and a leopard (the cat). In the Klum spread, Joanne Gair handled both the body painting and the photography for a shoot inspired by old-fashioned Hollywood pinups.
For all the things the Swimsuit Issue is – cheesy, shameless, pandering – it does have credibility as an honest-to-goodness showcase for swimsuit fashions. Smith claims 20 million women will read it. (The company says the Swimsuit Issue’s readership is 64 million, which presumes that 13.3 people will read each copy.)
Smith’s background is in art and fashion; before SI she worked at Glamour. Of the five photographers who handled the location shoots for this year’s Swimsuit Issue, four are primarily fashion photographers – Mazzucco, Steve Erle, Tiziano Magni and Stewart Shining.
The fifth, photographer Walter Iooss, Jr. is an SI veteran known for his portraits of athletes. He’s been shooting for the Swimsuit Issue since 1972.
For the current issue, Iooss photographed the lone athlete to appear in the magazine, tennis star Maria Sharapova. (Her four-page foldout wraps around an ad for Canon, with which she and Iooss have endorsement deals.) Iooss also shot several models on Cat Island in the Bahamas.
This is the first time Iooss has shot the Swimsuit Issue digitally, which he says allowed him to create better images in low light. Other than that, he says swimsuit pictures are swimsuit pictures.
“Not much has changed. Just the evolution of photography,” Iooss says.
One thing that has changed is the magazine’s attitude, getting sexier and showing models with smaller swimsuits and more seductive poses.
“No one had their legs apart in a 1964 picture. They do now,” Iooss says. The standards can vary year to year, he says. “If they show too much they get angry letters from people and they have to back off next year.”
Iooss says he is given plenty of freedom on his shoots, and considers working on the Swimsuit Issue a boon to his reputation. “I cherish these shoots.ﾅ It’s not something you do for money necessarily,” he says.
As for the shoots themselves, they take place between July and November in a series of 10- to 12-day trips to beachy places like Tahiti and Colombia. Iooss says they start early in the morning and can involve dozens of people, but he tries to run a relaxed ship.
“Someone’s got to remain calm, that’s one thing,” he says. “You try to keep the girl relaxed, have fun. ﾅ It’s not that hard. Just enjoy yourselves and have a good time and that puts people at ease.”
By Daryl Lang,
www.pdnonline.com
