Have we outgrown the age of sexy advertising? In The Cut's recent profile of Tom Ford, the magazine deemed the famously risqué designer as "over sex, seeking emotion." Earlier this summer, University of Illinois researcher John Wirtz reviewed nearly 80 advertising studies and concluded that sex appeal had zero correlation with propensity to buy products. In other words: sex didn't sell. And in early 2017, global publications looked around an increasingly political world and concluded that activism had replaced sex as the new ruler of marketing imagery.