The Brooks Nader SI Swimsuit appearance making its way across social media this week is, on the surface, a pale yellow bikini and a sun-drenched mood. Look a little longer, and it is also a quiet argument about craft, provenance, and what it means for a garment to have been made by hand rather than manufactured at scale.
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’s Instagram account posted a carousel featuring several celebrities in swimwear from Latinx-owned brands. In the sixth frame, Brooks Nader wore a pale yellow and cream crochet bikini by Lybethras Swimwear. The string top comprised triangular cups built from openwork circular knit motifs, lined in white, trimmed with a soft butter-yellow woven border, and connected at the centre with thin white ties. The low-rise bottoms mirrored the same circular crochet pattern. Her long blonde hair fell in waves with a casual middle part; her makeup leaned into a sun-kissed register, with bronzed skin, smoky eyes, and a glossy nude-pink lip. The overall effect was bohemian without being artless, the kind of look that works precisely because the garment underneath it has been considered at the level of individual stitches.
A Brand with History in the Pages of SI Swimsuit
Lybethras is not a newcomer to this particular platform. According to Loop Magazine, the brand has appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue for 14 years, a relationship that, by any measure of editorial loyalty, speaks to something more durable than trend. The brand’s page on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit site notes a presence stretching back to 2009, which places its SI association well before the current moment of heightened interest in artisanal beachwear.
What distinguishes Lybethras within that long association is the method. As Gone Bananas Beachwear notes, the brand’s bikinis and one-pieces are handcrafted in Brazil, a fact that matters when you are looking at a top whose entire surface is constituted by circular openwork knit motifs, each one a discrete act of making rather than a pass through a loom. The crochet construction that reads, in photographs, as breezy bohemia is, in its fabrication, closer to the tradition of handmade lace than to the fast-fashion beachwear it superficially resembles.
Brooks Nader SI Swimsuit Carousel and the Latinx Brand Showcase
The context of the carousel post is worth holding onto. By framing multiple celebrities in swimwear from Latinx-owned brands, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit made editorial provenance part of the story rather than a footnote. The choice to include Lybethras (a Brazilian brand with more than a decade of SI history) alongside newer names in that frame positions craft and heritage as continuous with contemporary conversations about representation in the fashion and beachwear industries.
Brooks Nader’s placement in the sixth image of the carousel is, in this sense, part of a longer editorial argument. The Brooks Nader SI Swimsuit moment is one data point in a set, but it is the one where the garment itself does the most visible work. A bikini held together by thin white ties and circular crochet is an object that makes its construction legible; there is no lining or structure to absorb your attention away from the making.
Crochet swimwear has cycled through fashion’s attention at intervals, typically arriving as shorthand for a particular strain of beach-inflected nostalgia. What Lybethras brings to that cycle, across its long relationship with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, is the insistence that the technique be executed as craft rather than approximated at volume. Handcrafted in Brazil and present in SI’s pages since 2009, the brand’s appearance in this latest carousel is less a trend moment than a reminder that some things in the swimwear market have stayed consistent precisely by refusing to simplify. The pale yellow bikini on Brooks Nader is the current expression of that continuity.
