Meet Sports Illustrated’s new 56-year-old swimsuit model
She’s the mom of reinvention.
Nearly three a long time ago, Kathy Jacobs was a huge-eyed Ford model who landed the address of Woman’s Entire world. Just after years of modeling in New York, the married mom of a person turned to a profession in baking and earning her very own elegance products and solutions.
Now, at the age of 56, Jacobs is primed to pose as soon as all over again. The five-foot-3 resident of Calabasas, California, is a initially-time Sports activities Illustrated Swimsuit Issue model, showcased in this year’s situation, out July 21. She experienced entered SI’s open-get in touch with contest Swim Research, and is a person of six finalists amongst 1000’s of swimsuit hopefuls.
“I feel it’s fairly great that I get to arrive back again to modeling all over again,” Jacobs, who recorded a teary video clip for Individuals magazine right after acquiring the get in touch with that she experienced landed a coveted location in the bikini bible, tells The Post. Her takeaway? “Don’t ever give up on you.”
About a long time of profession highs and lows, she’s experienced to are living by those words and phrases.
“I have reinvented myself so numerous situations,” Jacobs tells The Post. “I have been on the “Today” exhibit and Rachael Ray baking and accomplishing crafts.” Jacobs appeared in a 2017 episode of Steve Harvey’s “Funderdome” opposition for entrepreneurs, hawking her handmade skin treatment line Elegance Batters. She has also taken humbling, bare minimum-wage work opportunities, like sweeping up hair at Drybar.
She just lately experienced a health scare. Three years ago, she was stunned to master she was prediabetic. “The medical doctors claimed to me, ‘This is strange mainly because you are not chubby.’ It was hereditary,” says Jacobs, whose mom has superior blood force and has experienced numerous strokes, ensuing in dementia. The information induced her to wholly rethink her diet program: “I do not take in bread, pasta, white potatoes, rice or meat. I take in fish and do not have sugar.”
But her solve has been rewarded — and then some. In February, she and the other 5 Swim Research finalists flew to Turks and Caicos for a shoot in which she modeled additional bikinis than she could count and felt assured. “I feel I appear greater in a bikini than a a person-piece,” she says.
When it will come to elegance, the Texas indigenous says she only utilizes her very own skin treatment products and solutions, designed from collagen-helpful substances this kind of as pumpkin enzyme, vitamin C and orchid flower stem cells. She will work out four situations a 7 days, and stays out of the sunlight.
And Jacobs — who just sent her daughter off to health care school in New York — admits she’s experimented with some dermatological boosts, like Botox in her brow and lip fillers.
“I did crack down and get that just lately. I desired to appear the greatest I could. If 20-year-olds are acquiring it, why is there a stigma for anyone my age? I want to be transparent to folks. I do not want to be like the ladies my age who say it’s just their diet program and drinking a lot of h2o when it’s clear they have performed anything.”
Clearly, age isn’t keeping Jacobs back again.
The silver-haired stunner has more than 68,000 followers on Instagram, in which she enjoys paid partnerships with entire body-acutely aware brand names like Shefit sports activities bras.
And this 7 days, 29 years right after her first Woman’s Entire world address, she landed another a person, strutting her stuff in a tasteful teal two-piece. She — like modern SI types Tyra Banking companies, forty six, and Christie Brinkley, 66 — hopes to exhibit other getting older beauties that they can complete anything at all.
Up coming, she’s planning to get on another stigma in the manner earth: peak. The pint-dimensions pinup wishes to crack down obstacles for the vertically challenged ladies of the earth: “There are not any petite ladies on the runway and the normal peak of a lady in the US is five-foot-four. Clientele continue to only want tall ladies.”
Jacobs does not see why. “I am not just indicating ladies more than 55 matter, but petite ladies matter. It’s large that I acquired this far getting 56 and quick.”
