List of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover models

List of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover models enumerates the chronological history of cover models for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue has grown from being an issue of Sports Illustrated magazine created just to creatively fill space at a time of year with little sports news into a major marketing franchise that includes a special separate issue, a website, television specials, calendars, books and enormous amounts of advertising. It began as a short photo spread of women in bathing suits and has become a fashion issue for beachwear worn by the world's top models. Being the subject of the Sports Illustrated magazine cover is a well chronicled event which has both become a measure by which fame is measured and a status which is supposedly accompanied by a curse known as the "SI jinx". There seems to have been no reports of any association of the SI jinx with the swimsuit issue.

The media considers being the cover person for Sports Illustrated an important career statistic for notable persons and keeps track of cover appearance counts with Michael Jordan having taken over the leadership from Muhammad Ali. In the internet era, Time Warner had to create a dedicated web page for Sport Illustrated cover research.

There is a lot of public interest in who is on the cover of fashion magazines with websites dedicated to the subject. For supermodels being on the cover of important magazines is a matter of prestige and achieving the cover of Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit edition is quite a celebrated highlight. It is especially noteworthy if a cover model is fortunate enough to have a solo cover appearance. The unveiling of the swimsuit issue cover and its model is a media event, widely reported in the press.

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