Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is an American men's magazine. In the United States, it has been published by the Hearst Corporation since 1986, also having over 20 international editions.

Founded in 1933, it flourished during the Great Depression and World War II under the guidance of founders Arnold Gingrich, David A. Smart and Henry L. Jackson while during the 1960s it pioneered the "new journalism" movement. After a period of quick and drastic decline during the 1990s, the magazine revamped itself as a lifestyle-heavy publication under the direction of David Granger.

History
Esquire was first issued in October 1933 as an offshoot of trade magazine Apparel Arts (which later became Gentleman's Quarterly; both Esquire and GQ would share common ownership for almost 45 years). The magazine was first headquartered in Chicago and then, in New York City. It was founded and edited by David A. Smart, Henry L. Jackson and Arnold Gingrich. Jackson died in the crash of United Airlines Flight 624 in 1948, while Gingrich led the magazine until his own death in 1976. Smart died in 1952, although he left Esquire in 1936 to found a different magazine for the company, Coronet. The founders all had different focuses; Gingrich specialized in publishing, Smart led the business side of the magazine while Jackson led and edited the fashion section, which made up most of the magazine in its first fifteen years of publishing. Additionally, Jackson's Republican political viewpoints contrasted with the liberal Democratic views of Smart, which allowed for the magazine to publish debates between the two.

Esquire initially was supposed to have a quarterly press run of a hundred thousand copies. It cost fifty cents per copy (equivalent to $9.88 today). However, demand was so high that by its second issue (January 1934), it transformed itself into a more refined periodical with an emphasis on men's fashion and contributions by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alberto Moravia, André Gide, and Julian Huxley.

In the 1940s, the popularity of the Petty Girls and Vargas Girls, particularly among the Armed Forces provided a circulation boost, but also proved controversial: in 1943, the Democratic United States Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker brought charges against the magazine on behalf of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which alleged that Esquire had used the US Postal Service to promote "lewd images". Republicans opposed the lawsuit and in 1946 the United States Supreme Court found in Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 327 U.S. 146 (1946), that Esquire 's right to use the Postal Service was protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Beginning with its second number, a blond, pop-eyed, mustachioed character named "Esky" (created by cartoonists E. Simms Campbell and Sam Berman), graced almost every Esquire front page for over a quarter of a century, depicting the refined character of the magazine and its readership, mostly in the form of figurines, although during the 1950s, a stylized design of his face would often appear. Beginning in 1962, Esky would be featured as the dot on the "I" of the logo until it was changed in 1978. After then, the character would be occasionally revived, most notably during the 1980s and 1990s, a short-lived "Esky" award given to popular rock bands during the 2000s and during Jay Fielden's tenure in the 2010s.

Under Harold Hayes, who ran it from 1961 to 1973, Esquire became as distinctive as its oversized pagesEsquire, helping pioneer the trend of New Journalism by publishing such writers as Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, John Sack, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Terry Southern. In the mid 1960s, Esquire partnered with Verve Records to release a series of "Sound Tour" vinyl LPs that provided advice and music for traveling abroad. In August 1969, Esquire published Normand Poirier's piece, "An American Atrocity", one of the first reports of American atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians. Like many other magazines of the era, Esquire shrank from the traditional large-magazine format (about 10-1/4"x13-3/8") to the smaller standard 8½×11 inches in 1971.

The cover of Esquire from February 1961

The magazine was sold by the original owners to Clay Felker in 1977 (although Esquire Inc. kept its name until its acquisition by Gulf + Western in 1983). Felker reinvented the magazine as a fortnightly in 1978, under the title of Esquire Fortnightly, ditching the script logo that had been used (with minor tweaks) since 1933. However, the fortnightly experiment proved to be a failure, and by the end of that year, the magazine lost US$5 million. Felker sold Esquire in 1979 to the 13-30 Corporation, a Tennessee-based publisher, which reverted the magazine into a monthly, beginning with the July issue (dated both as of July 3 and 19). During this time, New York Woman magazine was launched as something of a spin-off version of Esquire aimed at a female audience. In 1986, the 13-30 Corporation (renamed as the Esquire Magazine Group) launched the New York Woman magazine as something of a spin-off version of Esquire aimed at a female audience. The company split up at the end of the year, and Esquire was sold to Hearst, with New York Woman going its separate way to American Express Publishing, being published until 1992.

The arrival of male-oriented lifestyle publications during the early 1990s and the problems of the magazine industry during the middle of the decade led to a sustained decline in circulation that threatened the future of Esquire, which had relied upon an elegant, highly-literate audience (during the second half of the 1980s it published a year-end register featuring leading cultural figures under 40 years of age) but did not appeal to younger men. David M. Granger was named editor-in-chief of the magazine in June 1997, fresh from a six-year stint at GQ, which he turned around from its fashion-heavy tradition Since his arrival, the magazine received numerous awards, including multiple National Magazine Awards. Its award-winning staff writers include Tom Chiarella, Scott Raab, Mike Sager, Chris Jones, John H. Richardson, Cal Fussman, Lisa Taddeo, and Tom Junod. Famous photographers have also worked for the magazine, among which fashion photographer Gleb Derujinsky, and Richard Avedon. In spite of its success, the magazine under Granger became increasingly criticized for its focus on the so-called metrosexual culture (a criticism he previously had late in his GQ tenure). David Granger stepped down in 2016, being replaced by Jay Fielden, who revamped the magazine into its more classical up-market style. At the same time, its political coverage became more comprehensive, following a trend among American magazine publications in general. After a series of shake-ups at Hearst's magazine division, Michael Sebastian became editor in mid-2019, reverting to its 2000s-era style.

In September 2006, the magazine launched a special style-focused issue entitled The Big Black Book, which beginning in 2009 was published twice a year until the Spring/Summer issue ran for the last time in 2018.

In 2010, the June and July issues were merged as were the December and January issues in 2015, and in 2018 the magazine moved to eight issues per year.