Recreating
TO THAT pocketsquare-wearing, sidecar-sipping human known as the “Esquire man”, this was life as it was intended to be: a roomful of wags in natty suits throwing back cocktails and trading banter in one of Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, as willowy models and square-jawed movie stars circled the room.
At Esquire magazine’s “Mavericks of Style” dinner, held at Le Coucou on 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 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 Fielden, 48, sounding nostalgic as he reclined in a banquette, wearing a steel-blue Ferragamo suit and sporting what may be the best head of male hair in the magazine industry. “How do you make that urgent to a younger generation?”
It’s a question that may determine the fate of a magazine that for 84 years has sought not just to serve the American man but also to define him. Since the days of Hemingway, Esquire has provided a running seminar in the arts of manhood. It is where young men turned to learn to mix a French 75, tie a full Windsor knot, ogle (in purely aesthetic terms, of course) the latest lingerie-clad Hollywood ingénue and absorb life lessons from stoical, stubble-face cover subjects like Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper.
But times have changed. As we move into the era of transgender bathrooms and LGBTQIA studies, when millennials are more likely to take their cultural cues from Justin Bieber’s Instagram feed than 6,000-word profiles of Sean Penn, Fielden is charged not just with bringing back Esquire’s glory days but also with figuring out exactly what the Esquire man – that is, the American man – is in 2017.
It is up to the 13th editor in Esquire’s history to decide if this is a crisis or an opportunity.
The new man
“It felt like Armageddon,” Fielden said, recalling the fire that ripped through his modernist Connecticut home in 2010. “It just sent this noxious smoke throughout the house. You close your eyes. You can’t breathe.”
Seated in a glassy Esquire conference room on the 21st floor of the Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan, Fielden described how the fire and smoke de- stroyed perhaps 80 percent of his family’s possessions.
“Your first response is, ‘All our stuff!’” he said. “But the point is, it was oddly freeing. Subliminally, we all do things to preserve the status quo. The major lesson that has helped me as an editor is to realise not to hang on to the things that would keep you from doing something dangerous.”
It is a nice metaphor. But even Fielden admits that it is no simple thing to decide what to keep and what to discard when you’re translating the magazine of Capote and Cheever to the Skrillex generation.
On that pale winter afternoon, Fielden, wearing a blue windowpane Cifonelli suit, was reviewing the 102 editorial pages of the March issue, all taped on a wall before him. That issue, complete with a redesign, is the first that fully shows his vision for the magazine. The cover subject is not a chiseled hunk in the mold of Ryan Gosling or George Clooney, but James Corden, the host of CBS’s Late Late Show.
After seeing a Carpool Karaoke segment featuring Corden, Rod Stewart and ASAP Rocky, Fielden began wondering if Corden was a good model for the new Esquire man. “He represents a lot of what I’m after,” he said, explaining that his version of Esquire “is aimed at a reader who’s an upstart, an iconoclast, an independent thinker, the most charming guy in the room”.
As a straight white man, Fielden does not exactly represent a departure for the top of the Esquire masthead. Indeed, his profile is almost too perfect for the job. Craggily handsome in a vaguely Willem Dafoe way, he grew up in San Antonio with a father who enjoyed hunting and fly fishing, so he has the “arts of manhood” element deep in his DNA. Esquire
But Fielden is also fashion fluent (he edited Men’s Vogue, working with Anna Wintour, until that magazine closed in the great magazine die-off of 2008 and 2009), as well as literary (he edited articles by the likes of George Plimpton at his first magazine stop, the New Yorker).
A magazine built on myths
When Esquire debuted from its Chicago headquarters in 1933, it was a magazine with a mandate.
“Esquire aims to be the common denominator of masculine interests,” a mission statement in that first issue read. Esquire, the statement said, would be a pointed rebuke to the “mad scramble” for female readers by the general-interest magazines of the day.
Esquire’s first issue was like the publishing equivalent of Meet the Beatles, with Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor, serving up articles by a future Nobel Prize winner (Ernest Hemingway), a future poet laureate of the United States ( Joseph Auslander) and a heavyweight champion (Gene Tunney), not to mention work by literary lions including Ring Lardner Jr, Dashiell Hammett and John Dos Passos.
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 celebrated editor Harold Hayes, and under his watch, Esquire did not just cover the ’60s, it became part of the story.
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: boxer Sonny Liston as “the first black Santa Claus”; ac-