Tom Ford has always sold a lifestyle. He is inextricable from his brand in a way perhaps no other designer but Rick Owens is. Ford is the ideal of his own aesthetic – a devil-may-care playboy, wrapped in denim and velvet, shirt open one button too far. This refined hedonism and sexual gravitas seeps into all of his advertisements, a component as intrinsic to his work as the clothing themselves. Over the years his ads have repeatedly landed him in trouble with the law and nearly led to his total censorship within the UK. "I asked myself, what was my Gucci all about? It's about celebrating a playboy, about hedonism, luxury, glamour, and sex,” His debut Gucci campaign featured Amber Valetta staring directly into the camera with her famous smoky blue eyes. Fairly standard fare for an era defined by the come-hither gazes of Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, and other it-girls. Ford would quickly abandon this style in lieu of something more voyeuristic. When the consumer isn’t acknowledged, the scene becomes real, a slice of life – cinema verite by way of Mario Testino. It established a unique psychological approach to marketing clothes – selling not just the garment but the lifestyle one has, if only they wear Gucci. “He understood more than anyone else that sex sells” The scenes were shamelessly sexual, leading Ford to his first major scandal. In 2003, he was threatened with an obscenity charge for his “pubic hair” ad. While Ford shrugged off the image as a simple mockery of a logo-obsessed culture, a UK paper declared him, “no better than [a pimp].” "The YSL woman is about excess...she drinks too much, she smokes, she has sex. She's lush. The Gucci woman -- you know what she wants, you know what she's after. The YSL woman -- she's going to torture you. You might have sex, but she will drip a little hot wax on you first.” At YSL, Ford again made waves with a fully nude ad for his “Opium” fragrance. The ad became the most complained about ad in UK history, with over one-thousand complaints filed. Love him or hate him, Ford's advertising work is as important as anything from the past decades. Swipe through for some of his most famous. - Kyle Julian Skye