Esquire (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Esquire magazine hit newsstands in October 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, priced at fifty cents a copy. It was supposed to be a modest quarterly run of a hundred thousand copies. Within months, demand had outstripped every expectation. By its second issue, in January 1934, Esquire had reinvented itself as a refined monthly, publishing Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, and Alberto Moravia alongside its fashion coverage. How did a trade offshoot survive one of the worst economic downturns in American history, survive a Supreme Court case, survive the rise and fall of the men's lifestyle boom, and still publish today in more than twenty countries? The answers lie in pinup illustrations, a mustachioed mascot, a fiction editor nicknamed Captain Fiction, and a fortnightly experiment that lost five million dollars in a single year.

• 2. Three Founders, One Vision

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  Arnold Gingrich, David A. Smart, and Henry L. Jackson launched Esquire as an offshoot of the trade magazine Apparel Arts, the publication that would later become Gentleman's Quarterly. Esquire and GQ shared ownership for almost forty-five years. The three founders divided the magazine among themselves along clear lines: Gingrich handled publishing, Smart ran the business, and Jackson edited the fashion section, which dominated the magazine for its first fifteen years. Their political differences ran just as deep as their professional ones. Jackson's Republican views clashed regularly with Smart's liberal Democratic politics, and rather than hide that friction, the magazine turned it into content, publishing debates between the two men. Smart left Esquire in 1936 to launch Coronet for the same company and died in 1952. Jackson died in a plane crash in 1948. Gingrich remained the most enduring presence, leading the magazine until his death in 1976.

• 3. Pinups, Lawsuits, and the First Amendment

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  In the 1940s, two series of illustrated pinups transformed Esquire's circulation. The Petty Girls, drawn by George Petty from 1933 through 1956, and the Vargas Girls, drawn by Alberto Vargas from 1940 through 1946, became particularly popular among the Armed Forces during World War II. That popularity attracted government attention. In 1943, Democratic Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker, acting on behalf of the Roosevelt administration, charged the magazine with using the postal service to distribute lewd images. Republicans lined up against the lawsuit. The case climbed to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327 U.S. 146, in 1946, that Esquire's right to use the postal service was protected by the First Amendment. After the legal fight was settled, the magazine moved on: in the 1950s, illustrator Al Moore took over from Petty and Vargas as the principal pinup artist.

• 4. Esky, the Magazine's Face

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  Beginning with Esquire's second issue in January 1934, a blond, pop-eyed, mustachioed character named Esky appeared on nearly every cover for more than a quarter of a century. Cartoonists E. Simms Campbell and Sam Berman created him to capture the refined, knowing character of the magazine's readership. For decades, Esky appeared mostly as a figurine; in the 1950s, a stylized version of his face replaced those figurines. From 1962 onward, the graphic appeared as the dot on the letter I in the logo, a position it held until 1978. After that, the character surfaced occasionally rather than routinely: he came back during the 1980s and 1990s, briefly reappeared as an award given to rock bands during the 2000s, and was revived again during Jay Fielden's editorial tenure in the 2010s.

• 5. New Journalism and Gordon Lish

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  Harold Hayes ran Esquire from 1961 through 1973 and made it a proving ground for New Journalism. Under Hayes, the magazine published Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Tim O'Brien, John Sack, and Terry Southern. In August 1969, Esquire published Normand Poirier's piece "An American Atrocity", one of the first published reports on atrocities committed by American forces against Vietnamese civilians. The magazine also partnered with Verve Records in the mid-1960s to release a series of "Sound Tour" vinyl LPs combining travel advice and music for listeners heading abroad. Running alongside Hayes's New Journalism era, from 1969 through 1976, fiction editor Gordon Lish earned the nickname Captain Fiction for the careers he built through the magazine's pages. Lish published Raymond Carver's short stories in Esquire, often over Hayes's objections, and is specifically credited with encouraging Carver's minimalism. He also published work by Richard Ford, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Ozick, Reynolds Price, and William Harrison. In February 1977, after Lish's tenure ended, Esquire published a story called "For Rupert - with no promises" without naming the author, the first time it had withheld an author's identity. Readers speculated the piece was by J. D. Salinger; Lish later said he tried to borrow Salinger's voice and the psychological circumstances of his life as he imagined them.

• 6. Turbulence, Sales, and Revival

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  Clay Felker bought the magazine from its original owners in 1977 and immediately began experiments. In 1978 he relaunched it as Esquire Fortnightly, ditching the script logo that had been in use since 1933. The fortnightly format failed badly: by the end of 1978 the magazine had lost five million dollars. Felker sold to the Tennessee-based 13-30 Corporation in 1979, which reverted to monthly publishing starting with the July issue of that year. The 13-30 Corporation, later renamed the Esquire Magazine Group, sold Esquire to Hearst at the end of 1986. The 1990s brought male-oriented lifestyle competitors and a broader crisis in the magazine industry, pushing Esquire into serious circulation decline. David M. Granger was named editor-in-chief in June 1997 after a six-year stint at GQ. Under Granger the magazine won multiple National Magazine Awards, and its staff writers - Tom Chiarella, Scott Raab, Mike Sager, Chris Jones, John H. Richardson, Cal Fussman, Lisa Taddeo, and Tom Junod - built strong reputations. Granger stepped down in 2016. Jay Fielden replaced him and shifted the magazine back toward an up-market, classical style. After a series of shake-ups at Hearst's magazine division, Michael Sebastian became editor in mid-2019.

• 7. Fiction, Napkins, and Running Gags

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  In 2007, incoming fiction editor mailed two hundred and fifty cocktail napkins to writers around the country as part of what Esquire called the Napkin Fiction Project, a deliberately playful attempt to revive short fiction. The magazine received nearly a hundred stories in return, from writers including Rick Moody, Jonathan Ames, Bret Anthony Johnston, Joshua Ferris, Yiyun Li, Aimee Bender, and ZZ Packer. The magazine's institutional humor ran on longer cycles. For many years the annual Dubious Achievement Awards lampooned the previous year with a running photo of Richard Nixon laughing, captioned "Why is this man laughing?" The February 2006 edition replaced Nixon with a photo of W. Mark Felt, revealed in 2005 to be Deep Throat, the source for the Watergate reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The Nixon photo was dropped permanently in February 2007, citing a poll that ranked George W. Bush as a worse president. The Dubious Achievement Awards were discontinued after 2008 and revived in January 2017 to cover the events of 2016. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert made her debut in Esquire in 1993, years before the work that made her famous, and Stephen King has appeared in the magazine in more recent years.

• 8. A Global Magazine

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  Esquire now operates twenty-three international editions, a figure that places it among the most widely licensed magazine brands in the world. Esquire Korea launched in 1995; Esquire Türkiye in 1993; Esquire UK in 1991. Esquire Kazakhstan has published since 2005. Some editions have had interrupted runs: Esquire Japan launched in 1987, closed in 2009, and relaunched in 2015. Esquire Germany followed the same pattern, closing in 1992 and reopening in 2019. Among newer arrivals, Esquire Saudi launched in 2021, Esquire Qatar began as a special issue of Esquire Middle East in 2019 before becoming its own edition in 2022, and Esquire France is set to launch in 2026. The Russia edition, which launched in 2005, closed in 2022.