It Was Inevitable

Kate Upton is your 2012 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover girl.Wow. About a year and a half ago, I wondered if the trend was going to be toward larger bikini bottoms. This seems to be a resounding "no."

Frankly, I think those bottoms are a little too skimpy. They might have crossed over from "sexy" to "look what we can get away with." I don't know. Maybe I need time to digest. (And maybe swimsuit issue covers aren't the place to look for subtlety.)

Kate is not the first girl to jump from rookie one year to cover the next. She joins a small club of models who made the cover in their sophomore years.
Carol Alt
Debut: 1981. Cover: 1982.
Paulina Porizkova
Debut: 1983. Cover: 1984.
Elle Macpherson
Debut: 1985. Cover: 1986.
Vendela
Debut: 1992. Cover: 1993.
Tyra Banks*
Debut: 1993. Cover: 1996.*Tyra skipped a couple years after rookiehood, then came roaring back with two consecutive covers.

Carolyn Murphy
Debut: 2004. Cover: 2005.(And yes, there's a handful of models who have made the cover their first time out.)

In other news, Hot Clicks has revealed that Bar Refaeli will be posing with athletes this year.
(That face is Hot Clicks author Jimmy Traina, by the by.)

I have nothing against hunky, shirtless guys per se, but I do hope there are plenty of dude-free photos of Bar this year. It would be a shame to have any obstacles in the way of her.

According to the cover, there are 18 models this year. That's one more than last year. Here's a nice preview of Alyssa Miller.Her hair is significantly lighter.

What else? If you need a little appetizer, Kate has a new photoshoot, video, and interview at Esquire.com.Good grief. That girl is so sexy it isn't even funny.

Bar Remodeling

The swimsuit issue Facebook page wishes its followers a happy new year with this photo of Bar Refaeli from 2009:It’s a nice pic. But if you look closely, you can see some sloppy touching-up.Apparently, seeing a bit of skin buckle around a swimsuit string would have been too hideous a sight for the cheesecake-viewing public—and made Bar look like a hideous monster.

Obviously, touching-up happens to every girl to some extent. It’s a good bet that it often takes place even before the photo is taken.

People with experienced, sharp eyes are probably able to find the seams in any photo. But to my eyes, there rarely is a gaffe like the above.

That brought to mind this photo (on the left) I found somewhere online. It looks to be a pre-retouch photo of the 1996 cover.The whitened the heck out of the teeth and eyes. They smoothed over Valeria’s cleavage and Tyra’s thigh. For some reason, Tyra’s butt had some sort of boxy angle to it, and they took care of that. Why they got rid of the dangling string of Tyra’s top, I can’t imagine

Last February, in anticipation of the 2010 issue, SI.com ran a gallery of Kathy Ireland photos. In the process, they unwittingly revealed that when this photo ran in the 1993 issue, they had erased her (admittedly creepy) disembodied right hand.I’ve noticed a couple other small, non-retouching-related mistakes, like this misplaced watermark on poor Melissa Haro from 2009:…and this photo of Paulina Porizikova labeled “Kim Cloutier,” which is in the rotation for the front page of the Swimsuit Collection:And then there’s this bewildering detail from Brooklyn Decker’s 2009 bodypainting video. (What was it about 2009?) The compass on her left hip (and another on her butt) is blurred throughout:…and in the photos that ran, it’s clearly a different compass:Joanne Gair must have been guilty of some sort of compass plagiarism. (I would have thought having “north” point upward was in the public domain.)