Martha Hunt Magazine Covers: Iconic Appearances Shaping Her Career

Martha Hunt's magazine work has done something rare across her two decades on the working market: it has stayed consistent in tone even as her cohort moved through three distinct phases of the model market. The covers themselves cluster around a tight set of titles: Vogue international editions, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, and the 2014 ESPN Body Issue feature that became the most visible scoliosis-awareness moment of the past decade. The portfolio is small relative to her cohort peers, but each piece has weight.

This is a working profile of the magazine career.

The early editorial years, 2010 to 2013

Hunt was born April 27, 1989 in Wilson, North Carolina, signed with IMG Models in 2009, and moved to New York the following year. The first three years on the IMG roster ran on the standard high-fashion development pattern: editorial for Lula, i-D, Allure, and the early Vogue international editions in Korea and Spain that the cohort below the top Vogue tier tends to start with.

Her runway debut on the international circuit came at the Issey Miyake Spring 2011 show in Paris in October 2010, at twenty-one. The 2011 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Rookie of the Year placement followed in February that year, which was the first major American consumer-magazine credit and the start of the relationship with the title that would generate her most-seen editorial work over the next half-decade. The New York Fashion Week schedule across 2012 and 2013 brought in Carolina Herrera, Anna Sui, and Marc Jacobs.

For the parallel career profile, our Martha Hunt career timeline profile covers the wider working build.

The 2014 ESPN Body Issue and the scoliosis story

The July 2014 ESPN Body Issue feature in which Hunt posed nude alongside the visible spinal-curvature evidence of her adolescent idiopathic scoliosis became one of the most-discussed body-image editorials of the past decade. The ESPN Body Issue had been running annually since 2009 as the magazine's nude-and-athletic editorial framework, with the broader brief of documenting unconventional athletic bodies in a format the rest of American sports media did not cover.

Hunt's piece worked because she did not minimise the diagnosis. She had been wearing a Boston Brace for nineteen hours a day through her early teenage years to slow the curve's progression, and the spinal scoliosis was still visible in the shoot at twenty-five. The ESPN feature was timed to coincide with the launch of her formal partnership with Curvy Girls Scoliosis Support, the youth-advocacy organisation founded in 2006 by Leah Stoltz that focuses on peer-led scoliosis support groups for adolescent girls. The combined ESPN feature and Curvy Girls partnership has anchored her scoliosis-awareness work for over a decade, and the National Scoliosis Foundation programming has continued to draw on the same material.

The piece also did something useful for her modeling career. The cover and the conversation around it expanded her American consumer-magazine recognition by orders of magnitude in a single news cycle, and the Sports Illustrated, Glamour, and Self work that followed across 2014 and 2015 drew directly on that visibility.

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit years, 2011 to 2017

Hunt appeared in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issues in 2011 (as Rookie of the Year), 2014, 2015, and 2017. The 2017 Fiji feature was her most-distributed appearance, shot alongside Kate Upton and Hailey Clauson as part of the broader 2017 roster. SI Swimsuit had been the most-circulated American swimwear editorial since the inaugural January 1964 issue, and the franchise's reach into mainstream media was the reason it continued to do useful work for working models well into the 2010s, even after the cultural conversation around the magazine had become more contested.

The SI work did not produce traditional Vogue-class covers, but the brand value to her commercial portfolio was real. The Victoria's Secret PINK and core lingerie campaign casting decisions that brought her into the Angels cohort in 2015 drew partly on the SI visibility she had built across the preceding four years.

The Vogue international edition cycle

Hunt's Vogue cover work has been concentrated in the international editions: Vogue Korea, Vogue Spain, Vogue Japan, and Vogue Mexico across the 2013 to 2019 window, with subsequent appearances in Vogue Russia and Vogue Portugal closer to the end of the decade. The Condé Nast international editions have historically been the standard cover-rotation tier for models in her cohort who do not break into the American Vogue or British Vogue editorial slate, and her work there has been consistent rather than exceptional.

The Harper's Bazaar and Elle international cover work has run alongside through the same period. Harper's Bazaar Russia carried her on covers across 2015 and 2016 before the title's international footprint was reorganised after 2022. Elle Spain, Elle France, and Elle UK have all run features and cover work across the past decade. The Glamour and Marie Claire international rotation has produced the secondary tier of consumer-magazine cover work that fills out the portfolio.

The cumulative cover record is mid-tier for her cohort. Hunt has not had the American Vogue or British Vogue cover that several of her peers managed, but the international edition consistency over a decade has produced a portfolio with more longevity than the single-cover spikes that have defined some of the more flash-in-the-pan careers in the same Angels class.

The Taylor Swift squad period, 2014 to 2017

Hunt's place in Taylor Swift's so-called squad through the 2014 to 2017 cultural cycle brought a parallel celebrity-press visibility into her magazine career. Her appearance as Homeslice in the May 2015 Bad Blood music video, the 1989 World Tour appearances across 2015 and 2016, and the broader Vogue, Glamour, and Marie Claire features that drew on the squad framing across the same period sit alongside the editorial work as a separate but overlapping visibility stream.

The squad period has aged unevenly. The press coverage at the time has not always survived later reassessment, and several of the women who passed through that cohort have since publicly downplayed it. Hunt has been one of the longer-lasting friendships from the period, and the Swift wedding parties and broader social-press visibility have continued through 2025.

The 2022 marriage and the post-2024 family arc

Hunt married Jason McDonald in September 2022, and their daughter Emerald was born in July 2024. The post-2024 magazine work has shifted toward maternity and family editorial in the lifestyle press, with the high-fashion editorial pace slowing as the family rhythm settled. The pattern matches the wider cohort trajectory through the senior Angels' post-2018 working calendar.

What the magazine record tells you about her cohort

Among the 2015 Angels class, Hunt has the most concentrated single-cause editorial moment in her career: the ESPN Body Issue scoliosis feature has done more for her individual recognition than any other single piece. Stella Maxwell's editorial work has leaned more high-fashion. Romee Strijd's has leaned more lifestyle and content. Hunt has sat in the middle, with the SI Swimsuit work anchoring the American consumer end and the Vogue international rotation anchoring the editorial tier.

For the parallel cohort profiles, our Stella Maxwell signature runway era profile, Romee Strijd signature runway era profile, and Victoria's Secret models and the new supermodel standard cover the comparable editorial trajectories from inside the same Angels class.

The shorter version is that Hunt's magazine work has done its most useful work in the spaces other models avoided. The ESPN Body Issue piece on scoliosis has aged better than most of the high-fashion editorial of the same period, and it has continued to do advocacy work alongside the modeling career for over a decade. For the entry tier of the same industry, our how to become a model industry insider guide covers the foundation work.