Esquire (magazine)

Esquire

The cover of the February 2016 issue criticizing the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries
Editor in Chief	David M. Granger
Categories	Men's
Frequency	Monthly
Total circulation (June 2012)	721,399
First issue	October 1933
Company	Hearst Magazines
Country	United States
Language	English
Website	www.esquire.com
ISSN	0014-0791

Esquire is a culturally left-wing and progressive men's magazine, published by the Hearst Corporation in the United States. Founded in 1933, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founders Arnold Gingrich, David A. Smart and Henry L. Jackson. With an emphasis on both coolness and status, the magazine's articles and features strongly emphasize men's sense of style and fashion, as well as a degree of intellectualism. This frequently includes a tension between high-status conformity and culturally approved originality. Esquire magazine has become known for its generally metrosexual and woke attitude, and its implicit editorial support for the advancement of increasingly liberal causes. As such it is said to represent the aspirations of the cultural elite.

History

Esquire was first issued in October 1933. 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, 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. This grew particularly heated in 1943 when the Democratic United States Postmaster General Frank Comerford Walker brought charges against the magazine on behalf of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The administration 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 Esquire v. Walker that Esquire's right to use the Postal Service was protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Esquire started in 1933 as a quarterly press run of a hundred thousand copies. It cost fifty cents per copy (equivalent to $9.14 today). It later 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 provided a circulation boost. In the 1960s, Esquire helped 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 August 1969, Esquire published Normand Poirier's piece, "An American Atrocity", one of the first reports of American atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians. Under Harold Hayes, who ran it from 1961 to 1973, it became as distinctive as its oversized pages. The magazine shrank to the conventional 8½×11 inches in 1971. The magazine was sold by the original owners to Clay Felker in 1977, who reinvented the magazine as a fortnightly in 1978, under the title of Esquire Fortnightly. 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 publisher, whose owners refocused the magazine into a monthly. During this time, New York Woman magazine was launched as something of a spinoff version of Esquire aimed at female audience. 13-30 split up in 1986, and Esquire was sold to Hearst at the end of the year, with New York Woman going its separate way to American Express Publishing.

David M. Granger was named editor-in-chief of the magazine in June 1997. Since his arrival, the magazine has received numerous awards, including multiple National Magazine Awards—the industry's highest honor. Prior to becoming editor-in-chief at Esquire, Granger was the executive editor at GQ for nearly six years. 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 who worked for the magazine include fashion photographer Gleb Derujinsky, and Richard Avedon.

Blog

In January 2009 Esquire launched a new blog—the Daily Endorsement Blog. Each morning the editors of the magazine recommend one thing for readers' immediate enjoyment: "not a political candidate or position or party, but a breakthrough idea or product or Web site." The concept for this blog probably emerged from the November 2008 "Endorsement Issue", in which, after 75 years, Esquire publicly endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time. The Daily Endorsement Blog was officially discontinued on April 2011.

Fiction

From 1969 to 1976, Gordon Lish served as fiction editor for Esquire and became known as "Captain Fiction" because of the authors whose careers he assisted. Lish helped establish the career of writer Raymond Carver by publishing his short stories in Esquire, often over the objections of Hayes. Lish is noted for encouraging Carver's minimalism and publishing the short stories of Richard Ford. Using the influential publication as a vehicle to introduce new fiction by emerging authors, he promoted the work of such writers as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Ozick and Reynolds Price.

In February 1977, Esquire published "For Rupert – with no promises" as an unsigned work of fiction: this was the first time it had published a work without identifying the author. Readers speculated that it was the work of J. D. Salinger, the reclusive author best known for The Catcher in the Rye. Told in first-person, the story features events and Glass family names from the story "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". Gordon Lish is quoted as saying, "I tried to borrow Salinger's voice and the psychological circumstances of his life, as I imagine them to be now. And I tried to use those things to elaborate on certain circumstances and events in his fiction to deepen them and add complexity."

Other authors appearing in Esquire at that time included William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, Murray Kempton, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ron Rosenbaum, Andrew Vachss and Garry Wills.

The magazine's policy of nurturing young writing talent has continued with Elizabeth Gilbert, who debuted in Esquire in 1993, and more recently, with the work of such writers as Chris Adrian, Nathan Englander, Benjamin Percy, and Patrick Somerville. Other writers who have recently appeared in the magazine and on Esquire.com include Ralph Lombreglia, James Lee Burke, and Stephen King.

The Napkin Fiction Project

In 2007 Esquire launched the Napkin Fiction Project, in which 250 cocktail napkins were mailed to writers all over the country by the incoming fiction editor, in a playful attempt to revive short fiction—"some with a half dozen books to their name, others just finishing their first." In return, the magazine received nearly a hundred stories. Rick Moody, Jonathan Ames, Bret Anthony Johnston, Joshua Ferris, Yiyun Li, Aimee Bender, and ZZ Packer are among the notable writers included.

Dubious Achievement Awards

For many years, Esquire has published its annual Dubious Achievement Awards, lampooning events of the preceding year. As a running gag, the annual article almost always displayed an old photo of Richard Nixon laughing, with the caption, "Why is this man laughing?" However, the February 2006 "Dubious Achievement Awards" used the caption under a photo of W. Mark Felt, the former FBI official revealed in 2005 to be the "Deep Throat" Watergate source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The magazine did continue the Nixon photo in February 2007, referring to a poll stating that George W. Bush had surpassed Nixon as the "worst president ever". Another running gag has been headlining one especially egregious achievement, "And then they went to Elaine's." (Elaine's was a popular restaurant in New York City. It closed May, 2011.)

Esquire did not publish "Dubious Achievement Awards" for 2001, but resumed them with the 2002 awards, published in the February 2003 issue.

"Dubious Achievement Awards" were permanently discontinued in 2008, according to an editor's note in the January 2008 issue. However, the feature was restarted in early 2017 with a look-back at "dubious" events of 2016, particularly to criticize Donald Trump.

Sexiest Woman Alive

See also: Sexiest Man Alive

The annual feature Sexiest Woman Alive designation by the magazine is billed as a benchmark of female attractiveness.

Originally, it was a part of the "Women We Love" issue that was released in November. To build interest, the magazine would do a tease, releasing images of the woman's body parts in the issues preceding the November issue. By 2007, it had become the dominating story of the issue and to create an element of surprise the hints were abandoned.

Year	Choice	Age
2004	Angelina Jolie	29
2005	Jessica Biel	23
2006	Scarlett Johansson	21
2007	Charlize Theron	32
2008	Halle Berry	42
2009	Kate Beckinsale	36
2010	Minka Kelly	30
2011	Rihanna	23
2012	Mila Kunis	29
2013	Scarlett Johansson	28
2014	Penelope Cruz	40
2015	Emilia Clarke	28
2016 and later	Award cancelled for social/political reasons

Awards and honors

2000–present

National Magazine Awards

2011

• In March, Esquire won a National Magazine Award for Digital Media—the first Mobile Edition prize—from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

2009

• Winner for Personal Service, Feature Writing, and Leisure Interests
• Finalist for Profile Writing

2008

• Finalist for Magazine Se

International editions

• China 时尚先生 (since 1999)
• Colombia (2012 - closed in 2017)
• Czech Republic
• Greece
• Germany
• El Salvador (since 2009)
• Hong Kong
• Indonesia (launched 2007, published by MRA Group)
• Japan (launched 1987, published by Esquire Magazine Japan Co., Ltd.)
• Kazakhstan
• Korea
• Malaysia (launched April 2011)
• Mexico
• The Middle East (launched November 2009)
• Netherlands, nl
• Philippines (launched October 2011, published by Summit Media)
• Poland
• Republic of China (Taiwan)
• Romania
• Russia
• Serbia (launched October 2013, published by Attica Media Serbia)
• Singapore (launched September 2012)
• South Korea (launched November 2007, published by Kaya Media)
• Spain
• Thailand
• Turkey
• Ukraine (launched in March 2012, closed in 2014)
• United Kingdom
• Vietnam (launched April 2013)

See also

• List of men's magazines
• Allegra Coleman
• Roberto Parada
• Meyer Levin
• Men's Health UK
• Nat Mags (UK publisher)
• Esquire Network - A television network based on the magazine

External links

• Official website (US)
• Official website (UK)
• C Net News article about the experiment of the Esquire writer in Wikipedia