Esquire (magazine)

Lore & Background

It was initially headquartered in Chicago, then New York City. The founders had different focuses: Gingrich specialized in publishing, Smart led the business side, and Jackson edited the fashion section. Jackson's Republican views contrasted with Smart's liberal Democratic views, allowing the magazine to publish debates between them. The magazine cost fifty cents per copy and by its second issue transformed into a periodical emphasizing men's fashion with contributions from Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others. In the 1940s, the Petty Girls and Vargas Girls boosted circulation but also sparked controversy. During the 1950s, Al Moore replaced Petty and Vargas as the main pinup illustrator. The character Esky, created by E. Simms Campbell and Sam Berman, appeared on covers for over 25 years.

Reader's Guide

Esquire's significance lies in its role as a pioneer of New Journalism, blending literary techniques with reporting through writers like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. Its legal victory in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc. affirmed First Amendment protections for magazine content. The magazine also shaped men's fashion and lifestyle publishing, evolving from a fashion-focused periodical to a broader lifestyle brand. Its decline in the 1990s and subsequent revival under David Granger demonstrated the challenges and adaptability of print media in changing markets. The Esky mascot and the Petty/Vargas pinup girls became cultural icons. Esquire's fiction editors, notably Gordon Lish, helped launch the careers of authors like Raymond Carver.

Did You Know?

• The character Esky appeared on Esquire covers for over 25 years, created by cartoonists E. Simms Campbell and Sam Berman.

A Depression-Era Gamble That Became a Cultural Institution

Esquire launched in October 1933 as a spinoff of Apparel Arts, a trade publication that would later evolve into Gentleman's Quarterly. The three men behind it—Arnold Gingrich, David A. Smart, and Henry L. Jackson—brought complementary strengths: Gingrich handled publishing strategy, Smart managed business operations, and Jackson curated the fashion content that dominated the magazine's first fifteen years. Their political differences, with Jackson leaning Republican and Smart toward the Democratic side, even produced published debates within the magazine's pages. What was originally planned as a modest quarterly run of one hundred thousand copies at fifty cents apiece quickly outgrew its ambitions. By the January 1934 second issue, the title had already transformed into a more polished periodical featuring contributions from literary heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and André Gide. The publication shared ownership with its parent company for nearly four and a half decades, and its headquarters shifted from Chicago to New York City as it expanded.

Pioneering New Journalism and Speaking Truth to Power

Under editor Harold Hayes from 1961 to 1973, Esquire shed its earlier identity as a fashion-and-pinup publication and became a laboratory for a new kind of American writing. Hayes championed the New Journalism movement, giving a platform to voices such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Tim O'Brien, Terry Southern, and John Sack. The magazine's distinctive oversized pages—roughly twenty-six by thirty-four centimeters—gave these long-form pieces room to breathe in a way standard periodicals could not. Esquire also took editorial risks that carried real consequences. In August 1969, it ran Normand Poirier's "An American Atrocity," among the earliest published accounts of violence against Vietnamese civilians. The magazine even ventured into music, partnering with Verve Records in the mid-1960s to produce "Sound Tour" vinyl LPs offering travel advice paired with curated soundtracks. By 1971, however, Esquire joined the industry-wide shift to the smaller standard letter format, marking the close of an era.

Survival, Setbacks, and the Granger Turnaround

The 1970s and 1980s tested Esquire's resilience. In 1977, Clay Felker acquired the magazine and attempted a bold reinvention as a fortnightly publication, abandoning the script logo that had anchored the brand since 1933. The experiment collapsed within a year, bleeding five million dollars, and Felker sold the title to the Tennessee-based 13-30 Corporation, which restored the monthly cadence. That company also launched New York Woman as a female-audience spinoff before the partnership dissolved in 1986, sending Esquire to Hearst. The early 1990s brought a deeper crisis: the flood of new male lifestyle titles and broader industry contraction eroded circulation, threatening a magazine that had long catered to a highly literate, older readership. David M. Granger arrived in June 1997, fresh from a six-year turnaround of GQ, and pivoted Esquire toward a lifestyle-forward identity. Under his leadership the magazine collected multiple National Magazine Awards and assembled a celebrated roster of staff writers including Tom Chiarella, Scott Raab, Chris Jones, Cal Fussman, Lisa Taddeo, and Tom Junod.

Pinups, Esky, and the Visual Language of a Generation

Few magazines have built as recognizable a visual identity as Esquire. The pinup tradition ran from the Petty Girls beginning in 1933 through the Vargas Girls starting in 1940, and later Al Moore's illustrations in the 1950s. The popularity of these images among servicemen during World War II drove circulation but also provoked legal trouble: in 1943, Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker sued the magazine on behalf of the Roosevelt administration, alleging it used the U.S. Postal Service to distribute "lewd images." Republicans rallied in opposition, and in 1946 the Supreme Court ruled in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc. that the magazine's mailing rights were protected under the First Amendment. Equally iconic was "Esky," the blond, mustachioed, pop-eyed character created by E. Simms Campbell and Sam Berman, who graced nearly every cover for over twenty-five years. From 1962 until 1978, a stylized version of his face served as the dot on the "i" in the logo. The character resurfaced periodically through the 1980s, 1990s, a short-lived music award in the 2000s, and again during Jay Fielden's 2010s editorship.