Magazine gets down to bare essentials as it bids to warm up readers

THERE are bare breasts, naked bottoms and a cover girl wearing three well-placed shells and a bit of sand, but this is no girlie magazine.

It's National Geographic.

The venerable yellow-bordered magazine, long a repository of gorgeous family-friendly photography, is publishing its first swimsuit issue, on news stands and online on Saturday.

Timed to roughly coincide with the publication of a racy annual look at bathing beauties by US magazine Sports Illustrated, the National Geographic issue is meant to offer lighthearted diversion.

"We just wanted to have a little fun, especially when it's so cold in the winter," said Bill Allen, National Geographic's editor-in-chief.

"And I think that this country could use a little bit of lightness and fun right now. We've had a pretty tough year-and-a-half So as the US prepares for war and weathers a shaky economy, here comes Hanna Hobensack, a fashion design student in Sydney, Australia, who posed for the cover shot in Hawaii wearing three scallop shells and partially submerged in water.

The cover is one of the few pictures specifically shot for the special large-format edition, Mr Allen said. Most are from the magazine's archives, showing how people dressed for swimming over the last 100 years.

"We had looked at all of the pictures that were coming in for this out of the archives, literally tens of thousands ... none of us were really satisfied that it was bringing things up to date," Mr Allen said, explaining why they sought a new photo for the cover.

He sent veteran National Geographic photographer Susan Leen to Hawaii "to find something that would really show what the contemporary feeling of bathing suits would be, sort of bring us all the way from our history back in the 1900s to the present."

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.

A pair of bare backsides from Cable Beach's "clothing optional" zone at Broome, Australia, is a more modern 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." Mr Allen said he saw no problem with this image or any other in the collection and. a history of swimsuits was in line with National Geographic's mission.