Sellebrity: My Angling and Tangling With Famous People

Born in the Bronx to Greek immigrant parents, George Lois left art school in his sophomore year and ultimately landed in the advertising department at CBS. He joined Doyle Dane Bernbach as an art director in 1959, immediately establishing himself as the talented enfant terrible of the American adverting industry. He left to start his own agency, Papert Koenig Lois, in 1961, where his seminal ads for such products as Smirnoff vodka and Coty cosmetics established him as a media darling as well as a master of the provocative sell. In October 1962 he began designing covers for Esquire magazine, among them the famed Andy Warhol shot, Muhammad Ali as St Sebastian (1967), and Claudia Cardinale, in a transparent vinyl dress, straddling a motorcycle (1966).