Controversy+Exclusivity=Success?

“I find people better looking without clothes than with clothes. You can go to a gym and go to a steam room and you see someone and think, He's really handsome. Then he puts on his clothes. Some weird pants. A thumb ring. Some weird socks. And it's gone!” -Tom Ford, Vanity Fair, March 2006

Objectification of Women? Do these women appear to be in positions of power or submission? Is nudity necessarily degrading?

F/W 2009 F/W 2012 Campaign

“I’m an equal-opportunity objectifier …I’m sorry, I don’t understand why our culture both worships and objectifies beauty, and then slams those of us who participate in it. Because I make that detachment, I’m capable of objectifying a beautiful woman, but that doesn’t demean her in any way. She’s beautiful because she’s a creature who exists physically, in the physical world, who happens to be in a moment of prime.” -Tom Ford, Interview Magazine 2011 "With a more natural relationship to nudity, we might also be freed up to find each other a lot more fascinating. There's an equality to being naked ; the fewer clothes and accessories a person wears the less you judge them, and the more you notice their truest traits, like their eyes or their charisma, their great hands or their one-of-a-kind hair or, most importantly, their personality and character. As much as I love clothing, it gives us one more layer to hide behind.” -Tom Ford, New York Magazine 2008

"As much as I've tried, it has been consistently harder to get images of nude men onto magazine pages and billboards than it has nude women. In a society where images of brutal violence are consumed during breakfast, the male nude is one of our last taboos. There's a double standard at play here: magazines that are happy to fund ads featuring an artfully lit female nude will balk at an image of her male counterpart.” -Tom Ford, New York Magazine 2008 " Women have long been objectified in our society ; images of beautiful female forms are everywhere. Go to a dinner party and women are wearing tiny dresses, exposing their legs and baring their toes in high- heeled sandals. They're basically naked, with a little bit of draping over their body. Think of how tough it must be to be a woman in our culture. Women are constantly judged by their bodies and the size of their breasts.” -Tom Ford, New York Magazine 2008

Racist? Erykah Badu African-American Jon Kortajarena Spanish Beyoncé Knowles African-American You Decide. atch?v=LQAS7mBadkE

Conclusion Controversial? Admittedly so. Objectification? Equal objectivity. Racist? Not for lack of minority models. Offensive? Relative. Banned? Not yet. What are your thoughts?