Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover History: 1964 to Now

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue began on 20 January 1964, with German-born model Babette March photographed in the surf at Cozumel, Mexico. It was a scheduling fix, not a strategy: managing editor André Laguerre needed to fill the winter weeks when American sport went quiet, and asked fashion reporter Jule Campbell to produce a feature. The first Super Bowl was still three years away. Sixty-two years later the issue has outlived the problem it was invented to solve, and its most interesting modern thread is the one closest to the magazine’s actual subject — the athletes.

Why a sports magazine published a swimsuit feature at all

January and February used to be genuinely empty. College football finished at New Year, baseball was months off, and pro basketball and hockey did not yet carry a national television audience. Laguerre’s answer was a five-page travel-and-swimwear feature that could be shot months ahead and dropped into a slow week.

Campbell took the section over in 1965 and ran it for decades, turning a filler item into the magazine’s commercial engine. By the 1980s, under managing editor Mark Mulvoy, it had doubled from 20 pages to 40 and was selling around five million copies a year. It became a stand-alone edition in 1997 and moved from February to May in 2019, by which point it was a franchise with its own staff, events and licensing arm rather than a section of a weekly.

The 1989 25th-anniversary edition fronted by Kathy Ireland remains the best-selling issue the franchise has produced, and by 2005 the annual advertising haul was valued at roughly $35 million. For a magazine whose core business was game reporting, one issue a year was carrying an outsized share of the revenue.

Cover milestones, year by year

Rather than list six decades of covers, this table pulls out the years where something changed. Every entry is a cover subject unless noted.

Year	Cover subject	Why it mattered
1964	Babette March	The first swimsuit cover; a one-off winter filler
1989	Kathy Ireland	25th-anniversary edition, still the best-selling issue in franchise history
2016	Ronda Rousey	First female athlete on the cover, then the UFC’s biggest draw
2016	Ashley Graham	First plus-size model to front the issue
2019	Alex Morgan	USWNT forward, weeks before she won the World Cup
2021	Naomi Osaka	First Black athlete on the cover
2021	Leyna Bloom	First transgender cover star
2023	Martha Stewart	Oldest cover subject at 81
2024	Chrissy Teigen, Kate Upton, Hunter McGrady, Gayle King	60th anniversary; seven covers in total
2024	Ilona Maher (digital cover)	Olympic rugby sevens bronze medallist
2025	Jordan Chiles and Olivia Dunne	Two gymnasts among four cover subjects
2026	Alix Earle, Tiffany Haddish, Hilary Duff, Nicole Williams English	Four covers; three athletes debut inside

Reading down that column, the athlete entries all sit in the last decade. For the first 50 years, a sports magazine’s most-read issue almost never put a sportswoman on the front of it.

The athletes who appeared inside the issue

Long before Rousey’s cover, athletes were showing up in the book. Serena Williams shot the issue in 2003 and 2004 and returned in 2017, the year she won the Australian Open. Simone Biles and Aly Raisman both appeared in the 2017 edition, months after the Rio Olympics.

The 2017 issue also ran body-paint features with skier Lindsey Vonn, a three-time Olympic medallist and three-time SI Swimsuit model, and tennis’s Caroline Wozniacki. Alex Morgan first appeared in 2012 in body paint, returned in 2014, and only got a cover in 2019 — seven years and two World Cup cycles after her debut in the issue, and one of three covers SI ran that May alongside Tyra Banks and Camille Kostek.

Rugby sevens player Ilona Maher marked the next step. Her September 2024 digital cover came weeks after she helped the United States win its first Olympic medal in the sport, and she returned for a second appearance the following year, which is the sort of repeat booking the franchise historically reserved for career models.

Megan Rapinoe’s 2019 feature, shot in St Lucia, made her the first out lesbian to pose for the issue; SI named her its Sportsperson of the Year later the same year. If you want the competitive record behind those names, our list of the greatest female tennis players of all time and our ranking of the best gymnasts in the world cover the sporting side properly.

How the editorial brief changed

Three shifts happened roughly together, and all of them are datable.

Size came first. Ashley Graham’s 2016 cover broke a 52-year pattern, and Hunter McGrady has since become one of the franchise’s most-used models, including on a 2024 anniversary cover.

Gender identity followed. Valentina Sampaio appeared in the 2020 issue as its first openly transgender model, and Leyna Bloom fronted a cover in 2021.

Age came last and got the most attention. Martha Stewart’s 2023 cover at 81 was a deliberate provocation aimed at the assumption that the issue had a shelf life.

Where the franchise sits in 2026

Sports Illustrated no longer publishes itself. Authentic Brands Group has owned the brand since 2019, and Minute Media took over publishing in March 2024 on a 10-year licence after the previous publisher’s licence was revoked. The swimsuit franchise survived that turmoil more comfortably than the weekly magazine did.

The 2026 covers went to Alix Earle, Tiffany Haddish, Hilary Duff and Nicole Williams English, with WNBA players Sophie Cunningham and Napheesa Collier and sprinter Melissa Jefferson-Wooden among the athletes debuting inside. That is a mix the 1964 edition would not recognise, and one that finally makes the issue look like it belongs to a sports title.

If you want the version of this story told through results instead of magazine appearances, our richest female soccer players breakdown tracks the same six decades through contracts and prize money. Put the two timelines next to each other and the commercial turn arrives at almost exactly the same moment.