To fit a new era
Esquire tress Virna Lisi with a face full of shaving cream for a 1965 article on The Masculinization of the American Woman.
Showing off his instincts for journalistic anarchy, Hayes dispatched literary pranksters Terry Southern, Jean Genet and William Burroughs into the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Facing down the armies of the police in the riot-torn city, the kimono-clad Genet, a prostitute and thief turned novelist, concluded that America would be better off being “reduced to powder”.
Like that heady spirit of revolution, however, Esquire’s zenith could not last. But as a result, for nearly 50 years, every new Esquire editor – there were six in the 1970s alone – assumed the job with an implicit mandate, to bring it back to its glory years.
There were game attempts. Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York Magazine, took over the publication in 1977 and attempted to revive it as Esquire Fortnightly. While Felker had his hits, the magazine bled money and was soon bought by an upstart publisher of giveaway magazines headed by two young Tennesseeans, Phillip Moffitt and Christopher Whittle, who installed Moffitt, then 32, as editor.
Industry sceptics reacted as if Tiger Beat had snapped up the New Yorker, but the new regime rode the “hip to be square” 1980s, when classic Eisenhower-era suits, cocktails and social climbing roared back into fashion, to a striking turnaround, selling the magazine to Hearst in 1987.
But by 1994, Esquire’s rival, GQ, had surpassed it in circulation. Esquire replaced highly Esquire regarded editor Terry McDonell with longtime New York magazine boss Edward Kosner, who vowed to revive its legacy as a writer’s magazine.
By 1996, the New York Times was observing Esquire’s “thinning spine and declining circulation”. A year later, Hearst handed the reins to David Granger, GQ’s celebrated executive editor.
Granger’s attempts to provoke did not always hit the mark. The endlessly dissected 1997 cover story Kevin Spacey Has a Secret was widely viewed as a clumsy attempt to “out” Spacey, who compared the article to McCarthyism.
By 2015, however, the numbers had started to slip, and critics were murmuring about Esquire’s seemingly aimless web strategy.
On January 29, 2016, David Carey, the Hearst president, strode into the Esquire offices with Fielden to introduce him as the new boss.
To borrow Hayes’ phrase, it was time to build some new myths.
Manhood in the Trump age
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.
It is easy to blame the internet, but to Fielden, that is a tired excuse.
“There are a lot of false narratives out there,” he said. “You tell me about the last time you had an amazing experience on a website that you wanted to print and hang on your wall. If that’s the Holy Grail, that’s something we’ve done with newspapers and magazines for our entire existence, and that’s where this thing has to hit, because the human race is not getting stupider.”
Even so, Esquire is pouring new resources into the web. This past December, Esquire’s 48-hour pop-up channel, “The Esquire Guide to Grooming” on Snapchat’s Discover platform, reached more than 3 million unique viewers.
This is not to say that an Esquire editor who reads literary critic Christopher Ricks for fun in airports has any plans to scuttle Esquire’s prized longform literary tradition to fit Twitter attention spans. In the year since Fielden took over Esquire, the country has entered what seems like a full-fledged culture war. With so-called altright 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,” 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.”