I found National Geographic Reveals Swimsuit Issue laugh-out-loud funny when I first read the headline. The magazine’s having a bit of fun with their photo archives:
One of the earliest photographs is from 1900, showing a Red Cross swimming instructor demonstrating strokes while propped up on a stool, wearing the cover-up swimsuit of the day, with only her head and arms uncovered. When wet, such a costume would have weighed about 22 pounds (10 kg), the magazine said.A pair of bare backsides from Cable Beach’s “clothing optional” zone at Broome, Australia, is a more modern archival image, from 1988. Two more posteriors were shown in a 1908 shot of surveyors near a rocky pool along the Canada-Alaska border.
A photo from 1917 showed two bare-breasted women from the Marquesas Islands, “where women dressed simply for the Polynesian weather — to the dismay of Western missionaries.”
I can’t help but think of a particular Onion News in Brief item:
VOLUME 32 ISSUE 07 — 16 SEPTEMBER 1997
Sales Disappointing For First-Ever Hustler Swimsuit Issue
LOS ANGELES?Spokespersons for Larry Flynt Publications are struggling to explain the poor sales of Hustler magazine’s first annual swimsuit issue, crammed from cover to cover with beautiful young women modeling the latest sexy swimwear. “We are utterly baffled,” LFP public-relations director Kenneth Micklos said of the issue, which sold 17 newsstand copies nationwide. “Our readership demographic is overwhelmingly heterosexual and male, with a strong interest in looking at beautiful women. It’s a mystery.”