Wherever I went as the editor of Sports Illustrated, the first question was inevitably about the Swimsuit Issue. Not about a favorite player or team or the Super Bowl or scoring tickets or an internship. Sometimes men would just say “Swimsuit” and grin. If they found out part of my job was to pick the cover, things got silly. Otherwise serious men asked what it would take—No, really, what would it take?—to get invited on a shoot.
In 2004, Forbes estimated the issue’s total revenues at $1 billion. My last Swimsuit Issue was published in 2013, with Kate Upton on the cover, and “Swim,” as the staff called it, was on 13 platforms, including print editions out of Beijing, Delhi, and Cape Town. We had a Swimsuit Daily blog, a supercharged tablet edition with panoramic photo sequences, two hours of video, a Chrome Web app, and 3D video for PlayStation 3. There was also an iPhone app that gave users a 360-degree view of body-painted athletes.
We sold coffee-table books, calendars, and trading cards, and we experimented with holograms. We had interactive, real-time polls. We produced TV specials and reality shows. We pushed it all out with Twitter, Facebook, and Flipboard feeds. After David Letterman revealed the cover with one of his Top Ten Lists, and after the New York party, we flew our most important advertisers and the models to Las Vegas on a private 727 for three more days of sponsored Swimsuit events.
Swimsuit was a franchise within a franchise, and we sold it harder than anything else we had, including our journalism. We were reaching more than 70 million American adults, not to mention the millions more buying international editions. And the thing was, it was all the legacy of a single female editor who had navigated a male-dominated workplace while simultaneously rebuffing accusations of objectification and worse. Jule Campbell was her name, and she walked that line for 30 years. Ultimately she got little money or credit for any of it.
Beyond the Gaze: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue, a film by her daughter-in-law, Jill Campbell, tells her story—which is not just about women in bikinis, but flashes back and, ultimately, forward as Swimsuit outlasts the historical moment that birthed it, evolving into something very different.
From Mannequins to Supermodels
In January 1964, S.I.’s visionary editor, Andre Laguerre, came up with “the sunshine issue” to fill the editorial void of early winter. (Football was over, baseball hadn’t started, and nobody cared much about basketball then, or hockey.) Inside were five pages of primitive swimsuit photographs in a larger package about diving and snorkeling in the Caribbean. On the cover was an unnamed model in a modest white two-piece bathing suit on a beach in Cozumel.
Readers barely reacted, and Laguerre was disappointed by the look of the package. But still confident that he was onto something, he turned the idea over to Jule, a reporter for the fashion section (“What to Wear to a Football Game”), who had come to S.I. from Glamour and had impressed him with her work ethic. He summoned her to his office and famously asked, “Jule, my dear, how would you like to go to some beautiful place and put a pretty girl on the cover?”
Jule took it from there, working out of a cubicle on the 19th floor of the Time & Life Building, editing her slides in a small closet used for swimsuits, sometimes with her star photographer Walter Iooss. She directed the shoots and selected the pictures, but it was all men, all the time, making the decisions over her choices. “They were men. They liked to look at pretty girls,” Jule says in the film, adding that it wasn’t very attractive to see them “salivate.” As Iooss remembers, “It was nuts.”
Like other women at the Time Inc. boys’ club, Jule drank with the men and put up with the Mad Men innuendos of the moment. That she had studied journalism at the University of Missouri and was married to the art director of Fortune gave her more insight into how things worked, but no more power, even though she was the creative force behind the franchise that was beginning to bring in millions.
The appropriately named Twiggy was the model of the moment, but Jule wanted athletic bodies that reflected what she saw as the sexiness of the culture, and in a groundbreaking move she gave the models editorial credits in captions and display copy she wrote herself. Kathy Ireland, Elle Macpherson, Cheryl Tiegs, Tyra Banks, and Christie Brinkley, among many others, say that that simple act both humanized them for readers and made them celebrities. Suddenly they were supermodels instead of mannequins.
The credits were a kind of byline in S.I., and, like the writers, the models were having a good time on the pages. You could see they liked each other, and their confidence reinforced the magazine’s swagger, which is what Jule had in mind when she talked about celebrating their beauty. Protecting the models from objectification at the same time was more difficult. That’s where the battle line was when she fought with male editors about what was or was not an appropriate picture. Meanwhile, the National Organization for Women picketed the Time & Life Building.
A 30-Year Run
The film braids interviews with photographers, models, and family around Jule, who was then in her mid-90s. Home movies are intercut with vintage documentary video, spectacular photographs (especially the outtakes), Jule’s Polaroids. Tyra Banks talks about being the first Black model on the cover. Paulina Porizkova explains her “Too Drunk to Fuck” T-shirt story (don’t ask) while she plays Mozart for Iooss in the hotel bar on a shoot in Jamaica.
The very good question of what a newsmagazine about sports is doing by putting a topless model on the cover is answered (deconstructed?) by an assortment of journalists, feminists, sociologists, and talk-show hosts. Most affecting is Stacey Williams, a star from 1992 to 1998 (featured again in the 40th-anniversary issue, in 2004), talking about Swimsuit in the context of #MeToo, including allegations that Donald Trump groped her in 1993 while Jeffrey Epstein watched.
Laguerre had given Jule a blank check, and as Swimsuit grew, production costs spiked. The philosophy was to spend money to make money—and Jule was good at it, taking month-long scouting trips around the world, always first class, the way everyone at Time Inc. liked it. Eventually, shareholder returns dictated holding down costs without letting it show, but Jule didn’t have to barter discount deals for hotels and travel like the editors who followed her.
Model day rates remained low (starting at $125), since appearing in the magazine could have significant benefits—a fact Jule leveraged from the outset, but it wasn’t easy. Some of the models felt like they had signed away all rights for too little money. Jule was tough about that, negotiating rights with photographers, and even carrying the necessary cash to Third World locations. It was always her shoot, her show.
As years passed, Time Inc. became increasingly corporate, and there are hints in some footage from later shoots that Jule was feeling micro-managed. But being asked to retire in 1996, at 70, came as a shock. She saw no upside.
When Iooss is asked why managing editor Mark Mulvoy would want to fire Jule, he says only “costs” and refuses to elaborate. The costs certainly weren’t in her salary. When she asks Gil Rogan, Mulvoy’s predecessor, for a raise, Rogan replies, “You have a husband.” Jule knew she was the lowest-paid senior editor. “It’s taken a lot out of my heart,” she says.
“The Jule era was coming to a close, and it had to come to a close,” Mulvoy says. “I was leaving as editor at the end of ’96. A new editor was coming in. Jule’d had a 30-year run of doing it. It was time for a change.” Time Inc. was a tough place that way.
One of Jule’s favorite covers was her last, in 1996, featuring Tyra Banks with blonde Argentinean Valeria Mazza. The cover line was “South African Adventure.” Apartheid had just ended.
The Rise of “Sideboob”
If Laguerre was perhaps S.I.’s most innovative editor, Mulvoy was the most successful, quadrupling profits, winning consecutive National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in 1988 and 1989, and launching Sports Illustrated Kids and the Golf Plus insert. It was Mulvoy who had doubled and then tripled Swimsuit’s pages before making it a stand-alone issue for the 25th anniversary, in 1989. It was an inspired move that resulted, staggeringly, in combined newsstand, advertising, and video revenues of $38,500,000. “More than Time made that entire year,” as Mulvoy points out.
The Swimsuit business was so good when I arrived at S.I., in 2002, that I hardly focused on it, except to tell my new colleagues I intended to inject a little more culture and humor to go along with the increasingly risqué imagery. Eyes rolled. The consumer research was coming back more emphatically than ever that the sexier (more naked!) the models were, the more money we’d make.
After looking back at some of Jule’s issues, I asked for the models to lose the pouty, come-hither coyness and start smiling more. Also, no more rock humping or surf orgasms. And the bikini tops had to be worn in more of the pictures. The Swimsuit editors, Diane Smith and MJ Day, knew what Jule knew: “the marketplace” wanted the models naked, and their only real alternative as editors was to produce beautiful, almost-naked pictures. Art, in other words. But the number of “sideboob” shots was rising.
I was told Walmart would refuse to display the coming issue—until they did their own customer research. The most serious backlash came not from subscribers but from the S.I. staff, some of whom had loathed Swimsuit for years. In fact, the strongest opposition had always come from inside, even in Jule’s time, when editors bet on how many subscribers S.I. would lose. They saw it as humiliating and degrading for everyone, and completely counter to the mission of a weekly sports magazine.
When I polled the staff, I found that about a third felt this way. The word “pornographer” was used. Another third thought Swimsuit was important to S.I., but only because it made so much money. The rest didn’t care, or thought the idea that I was polling them was funny, even stupid.
In anticipation of the 2004 issue, I ran a boxed notification on the Letters page, with the headline: “If You Don’t Want the Swimsuit Issue.” The notice provided a phone number for subscribers to opt out and have their subscriptions extended by one issue. Perhaps 30,000 of our 3.2 million paid subscribers asked to not receive the issue, which sold 1,563,694 on the newsstand, with Veronika Varekova on the cover, bikini top in hand.
A Magazine Becomes a Movement
The general decline of magazines, along with a combination of management greed and incompetence, put S.I. at risk. Beginning in 2016 (buckle up), AT&T purchased Time Warner, which spun off Time Inc. (including S.I.), which was ultimately acquired by Meredith Corporation in a merger deal. Meredith immediately sold S.I. to Authentic Brands Group (A.B.G.) for $110 million, underlining the value of the brand for licensing and new ventures rather than the magazine itself. A.B.G. then licensed the editorial operations to the Arena Group (formerly theMaven, Inc.), which mismanaged the magazine’s content until 2024, when Arena missed a licensing payment and had its contract terminated.
It looked for a few weeks like S.I. was finished, but A.B.G. awarded the publishing rights to Minute Media, a digital sports-content company. The culture began to heal. S.I. was back from near death, and the 2025 Swimsuit Issue came out this May in print and online. There was a traditional launch party, followed by a two-day live event called the Swimsuit Social Club, which was well attended by millennial women getting makeovers and listening to panels about female empowerment, rather than guys looking to meet Swimsuit models.
“Everything is different now,” says S.I.’s current editor, Stephen Cannella, who somehow held on to the reins and has S.I. moving forward again, beyond the traditional magazine it was when he joined S.I., in 1995. “Swimsuit is more of a female-lifestyle brand, and the target audience is women who want to improve their lives, rather than men who, historically, wanted to check out girls in bikinis.” Swimsuit has its own P&L, and Cannella doesn’t pick the covers.
“S.I. Swimsuit is no longer just a magazine—it’s a movement,” says MJ Day, now editor of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit. Under Day, Swimsuit’s audience of 70 million is now 70 percent female, instead of the other way around—which the business side describes as “driven by inclusive casting, body-positive messaging, and lifestyle-focused content.” There is still some sideboob, but female-focused campaigns make up the majority of sponsorship deals. “We really care about the women we spotlight and the women who come to us to see themselves reflected,” Day says. “I got that from Jule, and that’s the future.”
Day and Jule met on the set of the 40th-anniversary-issue cover shoot, in 2004, which brought together many of Jule’s models. Day, an assistant then, nervously approached and asked Jule if she would like anything, maybe a bottle of water. Jule asked Day about herself. “When she found out I was newly married, her eyes lit up,” Day says, “but she quickly turned serious.”
“Prioritize your family,” Jule told her. “This job will never love you back.”
Beyond the Gaze: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue is showing at the IFC Center, in New York, from June 25 to 26
Terry McDonell was the editor of Sports Illustrated from 2002 to 2012. His memoir Irma: The Education of a Mother’s Son was published last spring by Harper. He is also the author of The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers and the novel California Bloodstock
