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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Brooke Shields jeans campaign, 1980
The template for everything Calvin Klein did next. Richard Avedon shot and directed a 15-year-old Shields in tight jeans, and one line, asking what comes between her and her Calvins before answering "Nothing," did the rest. TV networks pulled spots because the line implied she wore no underwear, and the outcry only sold more jeans: shoppers asked for "Brooke Shields jeans" by name. That success had a sting, since Shields later said her contract was not renewed partly because she was overshadowing the label. Her own verdict on the backlash is that she was naive, which is the uncomfortable question the campaign still raises about selling sex with a teenager.
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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Tom Hintnaus underwear billboard, 1982
The ad that made men's briefs something to look at. Calvin Klein hired Bruce Weber for a $500,000 campaign, and Tom Hintnaus, photographed in white briefs, went up on a Times Square billboard. It treated the male body the way fashion had long treated women's, as the thing being sold, and turned an everyday basic into a designer label item. Nearly every men's underwear ad since, Calvin Klein's own included, borrows its sun-bleached, heroic look.
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Levi Strauss & Co.
"Launderette" TV ad for 501 jeans, 1985
Probably the most effective jeans commercial ever made. First shown to British viewers on Boxing Day 1985, the Bartle Bogle Hegarty spot has model Nick Kamen walk into a laundromat, strip to his boxers and wash his 501s while Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" plays. Levi's itself cites estimates that sales rose by as much as 800 percent, a figure nobody has pinned to hard data but which shows how far the ad turned a tired basic into something young Europeans wanted. Its wider legacy is the use of an old soul record to sell clothes, a trick advertisers have repeated ever since.
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Guess (company)
Claudia Schiffer's first Guess campaign, 1989
The campaign that gave a mid-priced jeans label a whole visual identity. Paul Marciano paired photographer Ellen von Unwerth with a young Claudia Schiffer, and von Unwerth's black-and-white pictures, with Schiffer in denim and a lace bustier, made her a star and made Guess look like a European film rather than a mall brand. The style became the Guess look for years, copied by every denim company that wanted a bit of glamour. Its staying power shows in what happened next: Marciano, von Unwerth and Schiffer reunited for the brand's 30th anniversary campaign, and the lace bustier returned with them.
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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Mark Wahlberg underwear campaign, 1992
Herb Ritts photographed Mark Wahlberg, then a young rapper rather than an actor, showing off his physique in Calvin Klein underwear, and the images became some of the defining pictures of early-1990s pop culture. It was the moment the logo waistband became the point: worn showing above low jeans, the brand name kept advertising long after the billboards came down. It also set the pattern of hiring a celebrity with a following rather than a model, a formula the label has returned to again and again, most recently with Jeremy Allen White.
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Benetton Group
David Kirby AIDS campaign, 1992
The peak of Oliviero Toscani's years at Benetton, and still the hardest image here to look at. That year Toscani stopped shooting his own pictures and began running news photographs under the United Colors of Benetton logo. The best known was Therese Frare's black-and-white photograph of AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed with his family, colorized for the ad. Critics called it exploitation, some were uneasy at its likeness to a Pietà, and some called for a boycott. Kirby's father answered that Benetton "didn't use us, or exploit us. We used them," because it carried his son's picture around the world. Whether it sold sweaters or sold Benetton as a brand with opinions is the debate it started.
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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Kate Moss for Obsession, 1993
Calvin Klein sent an 18-year-old Kate Moss and her boyfriend, the 20-year-old photographer Mario Sorrenti, to the British Virgin Islands, and the nude, unpolished pictures that came back made Moss the face of Obsession. Her arrival in the campaign is widely credited with changing fashion's beauty standards for the decade. The pictures also became the textbook example of "heroin chic," and critics have attacked the campaign ever since for glamorizing a gaunt, wasted look. Few ads show as clearly how one shoot can move an industry and earn lasting blame in the same stroke.
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Wonderbra
"Hello Boys" posters, 1994
Two words and one photograph. Trevor Beattie at TBWA London wrote it, Ellen von Unwerth photographed Eva Herzigová in a black Wonderbra looking down at her own cleavage, and the posters went up in Britain for the bra's relaunch starting on Valentine's Day 1994. A Merrill Lynch research note later reported a 41 percent lift in sales from that first two-week campaign. It is outdoor advertising at its most economical, readable from a moving car in a second. The argument over whether it played to men or to the women buying the bra has never really been settled.
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CK One
Launch campaign, 1994
A year after Obsession, Kate Moss returned to Calvin Klein for CK One, this time with Steven Meisel behind the camera. The product itself was the idea: one fragrance sold to men and women alike, and the campaign's casual, unisex crowd of young faces made that feel like a generation's attitude rather than a marketing angle. It was gender-neutral marketing decades before the phrase became common, and the shared bottle became one of the defining scents of the mid-1990s.
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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Jeans campaign in the wood-paneled room, 1995
The campaign that went too far, even by Calvin Klein's standards. Steven Meisel shot young-looking models posing in a small, wood-paneled room, and how young they appeared became the whole story. The outcry reached the White House: President Clinton said it was wrong to manipulate children for commercial benefit. The Justice Department's child exploitation section investigated and closed the case once the company showed every model was an adult, but the brand agreed to stop the campaign and the commercials were pulled. It remains the clearest line in fashion advertising between provocation and a campaign the public would not accept.
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Gap Inc.
"Khakis Swing" TV ad, 1998
Proof that a basic can be made exciting without any sex at all. Two couples break away from a crowd of dancers in Gap khakis and swing to the vintage sound of Louis Prima, with frozen mid-air moments that viewers had rarely seen in a commercial. Within days of its debut in late April 1998, Gap's share price jumped to 52 dollars from about 46, and an analyst said the khaki ads were fueling store traffic. It rode a swing revival that was already underway and helped spur it on. Few ads have made a pair of everyday khakis look this much like fun.
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Opium (perfume)
Sophie Dahl poster, 2000
An early statement from Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent. He conceived the campaign, Steven Meisel shot it and Carine Roitfeld styled it: Sophie Dahl, naked on a fur rug, in what looked like ecstasy. In Britain the Advertising Standards Authority received more than 730 complaints, the most for any poster since 1995, and ordered every Opium poster taken down as likely to cause serious or widespread offense. The image stayed in magazines, and newspapers reprinted it while covering the row, so the ban gave the fragrance more exposure than the posters ever could. Dahl herself called the picture empowering to women.
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Gucci
"G" campaign, spring/summer 2003
The most notorious image of Gucci under Tom Ford, when the label's advertising was as much about sex as about clothes. Mario Testino photographed model Carmen Kass, face out of frame, pulling down her underwear to reveal pubic hair shaved into a G. Gucci called it playful, critics called it degrading, and complaints reached Britain's Advertising Standards Authority, which did not ban it. It was meant as the ultimate ironic pun for a sexy brand in a logo-led age, and that is a fair summary of the whole Ford era: the logo as provocation, and provocation as the logo.
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No. 5 the Film
Baz Luhrmann's commercial for Chanel No. 5, 2004
The point where a fashion ad became a short feature film. Baz Luhrmann directed Nicole Kidman in a lavish romance, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most expensive TV commercial ever, costing £18 million ($33 million) to produce in November 2004, with Kidman paid £2 million. Whether that bought anything beyond spectacle is fair to ask: the film is remembered as a Luhrmann and Kidman event more than for anything it says about the scent. It is still the benchmark every luxury house measures its big-budget films against.
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Louis Vuitton
"Core Values" campaign with Mikhail Gorbachev, 2007
Luxury advertising without a model in sight. For its "Core Values" series Louis Vuitton had Annie Leibovitz photograph figures known for extraordinary journeys, and the first images included Andre Agassi with Steffi Graf, Catherine Deneuve and, most startling of all, Mikhail Gorbachev seated in a car with a Vuitton bag beside him and the Berlin Wall behind. Seeing the last Soviet leader in a handbag ad was the shock, and the company softened it with undisclosed donations to environmental causes. It reframed the brand around travel and personal history rather than fashion trends, and the series ran for years afterward.
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Benetton Group
"Unhate" campaign, 2011
Benetton's attempt to recover the shock of its Toscani years, made without him. Its in-house agency Fabrica doctored photographs of world leaders kissing their rivals: Barack Obama with Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Abbas with Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Benedict XVI with a senior Egyptian imam. The Vatican called the papal image unacceptable, and Benetton withdrew it within hours of launch. The campaign got the global attention it wanted, but it also showed the difference between using a real photograph to start a conversation and faking one, and Toscani himself criticized its methods while backing its intent.
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Just Do It
"Dream Crazy" with Colin Kaepernick, 2018
The sportswear campaign that turned a brand into a political side. Wieden+Kennedy built this "Just Do It" campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback known for his national anthem protests, and the announcement drew immediate backlash and calls to abandon the brand. The commercial premiered on TV as the NFL season opened. Edison Trends reported that Nike's online sales grew 31 percent the week the campaign launched, and the spot won the Emmy for outstanding commercial. It is the modern case study for a brand choosing its audience and accepting that it will lose some customers.
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Balenciaga
"Gift Shop" holiday campaign, 2022
Famous for all the wrong reasons, and the cautionary tale of the social media era. Gabriele Galimberti photographed children holding Balenciaga's plush teddy bear bags, which were dressed in harnesses styled like bondage gear, with one image adding a chain leash and a dog collar choker. Within days the brand apologized, said the bags should never have appeared with children and removed the campaign from all its platforms. A separate Spring 2023 shoot made things worse when viewers spotted a court document about child exploitation in the background. Unlike the provocations earlier on this list, nothing about it sold anything, and the damage to the label was the story for months.
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Calvin Klein (fashion house)
Jeremy Allen White underwear campaign, 2024
Proof that the 1992 formula still works. Calvin Klein unveiled its Spring 2024 campaign in January with The Bear star Jeremy Allen White in underwear against the New York City skyline, photographed by Mert Alas of the duo Mert and Marcus. It was everywhere online within days, and the brand brought White back for a Fall 2024 campaign that August. The lesson is the same one Mark Wahlberg taught: cast someone the public already has feelings about, and the internet does the media buying.
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