Esquire was first issued in October 1933 as an offshoot of trade magazine
Apparel Arts (which later became ''
Gentleman's Quarterly; Esquire
and GQ
would share 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 a plane crash 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 $ 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 right to use the Postal Service was protected by the
First Amendment of the United States Constitution. During the 1950s, Al Moore replaced Petty and Vargas as the main pinup illustrator for
Esquire. Petty illustrated for Esquire from 1933 to 1956, Vargas was hired to replace Petty in 1940 and was active until 1946. 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 ) to the smaller standard
letter size () in 1971. 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 (until the late 1970s, it published a "back-to-college" issue each September, and 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. After 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. ==Blog==