Leyna Bloom

Leyna Bloom, an American model and actress from Chicago, was one of the cover models of the 2021 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and the magazine's first openly transgender cover model. Her appearance in the July 2021 issue also made her the first openly transgender Black and Asian-American model in the swimsuit issue's history.

Chromat and the 2017 runway

Bloom was born in Chicago in 1993 or 1994; her mother is Filipina and her father African-American. Her early modeling record includes a 2014 cover feature in C*NDY magazine on prominent trans women.

In September 2017 she drew press attention for walking the runway for Chromat at New York Fashion Week. Chromat is a New York label whose range includes swimwear, and the show put Bloom in front of the swim press early in her career. A month later, in October 2017, she became the first openly transgender woman of color to appear in Vogue India.

Later that year she was cast as one of the faces of the H&M x Moschino by Jeremy Scott Fall/Winter 2018 campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel. In March 2019 she walked the Tommy Hilfiger x Zendaya show at Paris Fashion Week, the only transgender woman of color in the cast.

Port Authority at Cannes, 2019

In 2019 she made her feature film debut in Port Authority, directed by Danielle Lessovitz, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. It was the first film in the festival's 72-year history with a trans woman of color in a leading role. In 2021 she appeared in the final season of the FX series Pose.

Leyna Bloom's 2021 swimsuit cover

Sports Illustrated announced in March 2021 that Bloom would appear in that year's swimsuit issue, and she was named one of its cover models alongside the tennis player Naomi Osaka. The issue came one year after Valentina Sampaio became the first openly transgender model inside the magazine's swimsuit pages, so the cover took that change from the inside pages to the front.

For the swimwear trade, the Sports Illustrated issue is the most visible annual display of the bikini and one-piece, and its casting is read as a signal of who the mass market considers a swimsuit model. Bloom's cover placed a trans woman of color in that position for the first time, in bikini bottoms and swimsuits from the same commercial range the issue has always used.

Earlier versions of this page gave her birth year as 1990, described a ballroom dance background and family history that the sources checked here do not support, and called her the first transgender woman of color in the issue's 57-year history. The firsts given above are the ones the sources record.

Last updated October 7, 2026