There was no sight of Jabba The Hutt in the photo that Paulina Porizkova posted on Tuesday (June 1), but considering things didn’t go great the last time a gorgeous woman rocked a gold bikini around him, it’s probably for the best. Paulina, 56, wasn’t staying on Tatooine in her vacation pic, but she was surrounded by plenty of sand and sun. “A vacation pick: doing my best impersonation of a wood pillar,” she captioned the shot of her looking incredible in a gold string bikini that, as it turns out, is a piece of swimwear that’s near and dear to her heart.
“This one is probably about five years old,” the supermodel said of the outfit, “but it’s become a recent favorite. This is why I hold on to all my clothing, I always seem to like it better a few years down the line. When it’s not longer fashionable or worn by everyone.” She then ended the post with a string of hilarious hashtags, including “#screwbeingfashionable” #betweenJLoandbettywhite,” and the one that seems most poignant for this and every other picture of the 56-year-old: “#sexyhasnoexpirationdate.”
A week before her gold bikini moment, Paulina celebrated her son, Oliver, turning 23, one day after graduating from college. “My heart goes out to all of us who are attending such momentous occasions as graduations – with someone crucial missing,” she wrote, referring to Ric Ocasek, Oliver’s father and Paulina’s husband, who passed away in 2019. “ Both of our boys graduated on time, with honors, after having the worst year and a half of their lives. I’m so incredibly proud of them. And I know he is too. Together, we’ve raised some outstanding human beings.”
A month before this graduation moment, Paulina revealed that she’s struck up a new romance with director Aaron Sorkin. The couple made their red carpet debut at the 93rd annual Academy Awards.
The ”Princess Leia bikini” – aka “Slave Leia” – has been both a symbol of geek sexuality and a symbol of nerd culture’s problematic views towards women. The scene where Carrie Fisher wears the outfit in Return of the Jedi was called “softcore porn dropped in the middle of a kids’ adventure story,” and “a not-even-concealed Orientalist harem fantasy, complete with desert, chuckling dissipated bloated pasha and hapless princess decked out in fetishwear and chains,” by Noah Berlatsky in The Guardian. Carrie told Daisey Ridley in a 2015 piece for Interview magazine that she should “fight for your outfit. Don’t be a slave like I was.”
That chain only"enslaved"me until I could use the frabjous thing to KILL THAT DROOLING SWOLLEN SUPERTONGUED SLUG&whirl him off into infinity
— Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) July 15, 2015
However, Carrie objected to erasing the outfit and scene from Star Wars history. “I think that’s stupid,” she said to the Wall Street Journal in 2015 when asked about the notion of stop making merchandise of her in the bikini. “The father who flipped out about it, ‘What am I going to tell my kid about why she’s in that outfit?’ Tell them that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage.”