At Esquire magazine’s “Mavericks of Style” dinner, held at Le Coucouon a rainy night this past November, spirits were so high, and consumed so freely, that it might as well have been 1966 — doubly so, since Gay Talese, Esquire’s living monument to the New Journalism of the 1960s, was holding court, dry gin martini in hand, a few yards away from Jay Fielden, Esquire’s new editor in chief.
“There was a period of time when Esquire had a real literary charisma, and there was a culture that responded to it,” said Mr. Fielden, 48, sounding nostalgic as he reclined in a banquette, wearing a steel-bluel Ferragamo suit and sporting what may be the best head of male hair in the magazine industry, a cascade of artfully coifed curls that calls to mind both the belletrist whimsy of Oscar Wilde and the gunslinger gusto of Wild Bill Hickok. “How do you make that urgent to a younger generation?”
Mr. Fielden circulating at an Esquire dinner at Le Coucou in Manhattan.CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times
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The New Esquire Man
At Esquire’s Helm
Esquire was founded in 1933 with a mission “to be the common denominator of masculine interests.” Thirteen editors have tried to define what that means.
- Arnold Gingrich 1933 to 1945
- David Smart November 1945 to November 1947
- Frederic Birmingham November 1947 to April 1957
- Harold Hayes September 1961 to July 1973
- Don Erickson August 1973 to December 1974
- Arnold Gingrich January 1975 to April 1976
- Don Erickson May 1976 to April 1977
- Byron Dobell May 1977 to December 1977
- Clay Felker January 1978 to May 1979
- Phillip Moffitt June 1979 to March 1987
- Lee Eisenberg April 1987 to December 1990
- Terry McDonell Jan 1991 to December 1993
- Ed Kosner January 1994 to July 1997
- David Granger August 1997 to May 2016
- Jay Fielden June 2016 to present
Through the Depression and the war years, the pages of Esquire were the place to be for the brightest and brawniest of American writers. Hemingway published his classic story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the magazine in 1936. F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to spend more time in Esquire than in the Commodore Hotel bar, publishing 43 stories in the magazine in just seven years before his death in 1940 at age 44.
Despite its literary bona fides, Esquire was no undergraduate seminar. Thanks to steamy pinup illustrations by artists including Alberto Vargas, Esquire was basically Playboy before Playboy. A ban of Esquire by the Office of the Postmaster General led to a watershed 1946 Supreme Court decision on censorship that helped open the floodgates for Hugh Hefner’s topless Playmates the next decade.
Observers might have expected this monument to bourbon-and-shotguns manhood to crumble when faced with the rise of feminism, flower power and civil rights in 1960s. Instead, Esquire entered a second golden age.
“A successful magazine has to build a myth its readers can believe in,” decreed the celebrated editor Harold Hayes, and under his watch, Esquire did not just cover the ’60s, it became part of the story.
The art director George Lois, known for his cover showing Andy Warhol being sucked into a can of Campbell’s soup, turned the Esquire cover into a form of pop art: the boxer Sonny Liston as “the first black Santa Claus”; the Italian actress Virna Lisi with a face full of shaving cream for a 1965 article on “The Masculinization of the American Woman.”
...Manhood in the Trump Age
Mr. Fielden takes the helm at a time when men’s magazines as a category seem to be having an identity crisis. Details has shuttered, Maxim has cycled through editors, and Playboy has done away with its raison d’être, naked women.
In the year since Mr. Fielden took over Esquire, the country has entered what seems like a full-fledged culture war. With so-called alt-right provocateurs like Stephen K. Bannon marching into power, and armies of women in bright pink hats marching in protest, it’s a little hard to say where the literate centrist coastal male with a taste for Raymond Carver — that is, the traditional Esquire man — fits in.
“I understand what the hurdles are, what the difficulties are,” Mr. Fielden said. “They’re certainly things that keep me up, and sometimes ruin my weekend.”
But, he added: “I look back on what the New Journalism invented, what Gay did, what Tom Wolfe did, what Norman Mailer did. They had to up the literary horsepower with new tools and techniques in order to compete with the speed and seismic shock of one insane event after another in the ’60s and ’70s. We’re just having to do the same thing.”
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The whole story: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/fashion/esquire-magazine-jay-fielden.html
