The magazine for bald, overweight, undersexed menGeriatric Esquire plays the bimbo-cover gambit...again
By DAVE EGGERS
It's almost too sad for words.
Inside the July issue of Esquire, there's a one-page tribute to George Lois, the man duly credited for designing, in the '60s, some of Esquire's most innovative and provocative covers. He did the one with Andy Warhol drowning in the Campbell's soup can. He posed Muhammed Ali martyred like St. Sebastian for his sport. He did Roy Cohn wearing a tinsel halo. Time after time, Lois, a former advertising art director, combined bold concepts with simple and seamless execution. His covers made a point, and made it powerfully -- they were the perfect complement to the New Journalism Esquire was pioneering at the time. Lois was doing with Esquire what Tina Brown is attempting to do with The New Yorker -- create striking, indelible images that sell magazines and make news.
But this tribute to Esquire's glorious past is dolefully ironic, for it only draws attention to its feeble present. The cover of Esquire's "HOT Fiction Summer Reading Special" issue consists of a coy, bikini-clad blond woman reading Esquire on the beach, with the magazine ingeniously positioned to hide her presumably bare breasts. It's horrible. The type is all done in hot pink, baby blue and bright yellow, with the word "HOT" leaping out like a neon sign over a burlesque show. Adding conceptual insult to graphic injury, they use the old infinite-regress gimmick, where the model is reading the same issue that bears her picture, and that model is reading it too, etc, etc. This tricky, hall-of-mirrors idea is so clever that another groundbreaking periodical, Muscle and Fitness, used it in June.
Esquire's dopey cover raises certain questions: Couldn't the Lois tribute have waited until they had a cover worthy of comparison? And: Isn't Lois, if he's still alive, available in some sort of consulting capacity?
(Speaking of aging, out-of-touch magazines, the latest issue of Rolling Stone also plays the beach-bimbo game, giving us MTV's Jenny McCarthy, wearing a bikini top and denim cutoffs, squirting mustard onto a hot dog. It's stupid, but it's got considerably more verve than Esquire's version.)
To be sure, Esquire has tickled readers' lower chakras to sell its summer fiction issues before. But gone is the sense of campy fun that used to make the concept bearable. In 1994's edition, Christie Brinkley did the topless thing, but she was covering her breasts with Kissinger's "Diplomacy," and the coverline read "Drop That Book!", encouraging readers to read Esquire's sort of fiction instead. The humor forced you to forgive the shamelessness of it all.
But it looks like it's been a while since they've had fun at Esquire. With declining ad pages and circulation spiraling ever-downward, the magazine is in the middle of a major mid-life crisis. It's trying to simultaneously compete with younger, hipper men's magazines like Details while retaining something of its sophisticated wit and literary cachet. The result is often confused, occasionally embarrassing (they recently did a ghastly series resurrecting the Vargas girls), and would never be confused with the confident, risk-taking Esquire of old. Long gone are the days when Esquire was setting trends, breaking writers -- or even breaking even. For the last few years it seems like it just can't find the mix to lure back the smart, prosperous 25-to-39 year-old readers that it so desperately needs. Advertisers, of course, have taken notice.
Lately, the sort of advertising found in Esquire eerily echoes the nervous, insecure state of the magazine itself: mail-order companies offer dubious opportunities to whiten your teeth, improve your body or your sex life, or stave off the loss of your hair. (Poor Mark Leyner -- his "Wild Kingdom" column is abutted by an ad that extols "the Chinese secret to full, lustrous hair and a youthful appearance.") Esquire's advertising environment paints the demographically-undesirable picture of a bald, overweight, undersexed and yellow-toothed reader. And even if that reader is well-read, it's no doubt making it hard for the magazine to attract A-list advertisers like Dewar's and Tanqueray, who aim to reach the young, trend-setting sort of audience with whom Esquire has lost touch.
There's a smell of desperation that emanates from the magazine, but their desperation has resulted in little in the way of innovation, especially on its covers. (If you're sinking in quicksand, best not to thrash about.) The covers have become increasingly conservative in their adherence to the conventional wisdom of consumer magazines. Celebrities rule the day, babes work in a pinch, and celebrity babes -- Sharon Stone! Demi Moore! Tom Cruise! -- provide the best of both worlds. Even while playing the celebrity-face game, most of the time Esquire still can't get it right. Recent cover models have included Steve Martin and Jay Leno -- neither of whom is likely to incite a newsstand stampede.
Actually, if you can get past this month's cover, there's some great writing inside. David Foster Wallace does about 10,000 words on professional tennis, complete with his signature footnotes, and while in "Infinite Jest" his meditations on the game became maddening in their length (unusual for a writer of such usual concision), here he's looser and funnier, and the piece is enjoyable. Elsewhere, there's Mike Lupica's annual Deion Sanders Awards for sports obnoxiousness, a clever piece about cable channel proliferation, and fiction by Tobias Wolff, Robert Stone, Bruce Jay Friedman and Anthony Giardina. You can judge the magazine by its covers, but it's still a decent read.
Rough trade in The New Republic
New Republic readers are accustomed to a fairly buttoned-down style of advertising. University publishing houses give notice of new books, multinational conglomerates remind readers of their environmental records and government agencies like the Post Office talk about some new service they're offering. Sure, there's the odd Absolut ad here or there -- but nothing to prepare the nation's wonks for the back-cover image of a well-coiffed young man, wearing only black briefs and white socks, thrusting his loins forward in a gesture that to the magazine's blazer-and-loafers readership could only say one thing: "Hello sailor!"
The Jean Genet Memorial ad was produced by Calvin Klein, which is presumably running the campaign -- which features the same robust model in a variety of poses -- to beef up its brief sales inside the Beltway.
Publisher Joan Stapleton says the ads have "attracted a lot of attention. Some people are curious, and others say, 'What gives?' " She says that Linda Wachner, the CEO of Warnaco, which owns Calvin Klein and Speedo (another unlikely New Republic advertiser), is a "great admirer" of the magazine, and pushed through the ad buy herself. The initial Calvin Klein buy was for six issues, and they've just renewed for next year.
Stapleton insists that New Republic readers on the whole have admired the magazine's spunk. But when asked if she would have run Calvin's infamous jailbait-in-the-basement-check-out-the-pubic-hair campaign, she didn't hesitate: "Probably not."
Dave Eggers is the co-publisher and co-editor of Might magazine.