Paulina Porizkova was the first woman from Czechoslovakia to appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Porizkova was born in Prostějov, then part of Czechoslovakia, and moved to Sweden with her family after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. She began modeling in Europe before gaining wider attention in American fashion and advertising.
Her Sports Illustrated milestone came in 1984, when she was 18 years old. The cover helped make her one of the most recognizable international models of the 1980s and connected European high-fashion modeling with the magazine’s mass-market audience.
The nationality is often misidentified as Swedish because Porizkova grew up in Sweden and began her career there. Her birthplace and childhood nationality, however, were Czechoslovakian.