"It really sends the message that you're not worthy right now to put on a suit," said Malia Mills, a swimsuit designer whose brand's motto is "Love Thy Differences".
There was a time, not long ago, when the surest path to modeling stardom was down the runway of a top designer's show, when it would have been unthinkable to find among the industry's top ranks a swimsuit girl whose main claims to fame were ad campaigns for Guess jeans and Beach Bunny Swimwear.
He may not have known how to outsmart the software that tracked his financial transactions, but he certainly knew from his work as a prosecutor that young women who sell themselves on Web sites for that kind of money aren't successful swimsuit models whose upper-middle-class parents showed them their way around a salad fork early on.
So I walked, instead of wishing I could crawl into my shoulder blades, you know?" Coverage, or the lack thereof, was also at the center of Rose's conversations with Anne Cole, "the doyenne of the bathing-suit world," whose father began making swimsuits in 1925.
Back inside, a cleaning lady was mopping the white, white floors with a Swiffer whose green leaves matched the swimsuit's, Mr. Kors's worldview not being one that contains dirt — nor, in all instances, common sense.
One of her best-known pieces, "The Venus of Willendorf," on view at the NAGA exhibition, depicts a nude woman whose ample body makes the typical swimsuit model seem preposterously puny.
Commissioned by a female editor, M. J. Day (this is her fourth year editing the Swimsuit Issue), and photographed by a female photographer, Taylor Ballantyne, with an all-female crew, "In Her Own Words" does not feature models wearing swimsuits but, rather, nude models whose bare flesh has been painted with descriptive words of their own choosing.
Rachel McAdams, whose neckline looked a little like a Speedo swimsuit, looked way more modern in her August Getty Atelier gown.
A pet store whose aquarium made him unwittingly think of people in swimsuits.
Zinner, a prolific photographer whose subjects included models wearing Rudi Gernreich's eye-popping swimsuits and luminaries such as Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor, died in March at age 92.
