MAGCULTURE.COM / BLOG

The new Esquire

A couple of issues ago UK Esquire re-launched under a new creative team led by editor Jeremy Langmead (ex-Wallpaper*) and art director David McKendrick (ex Winkreative Wallpaper*). The new magazine comes in a slightly smaller US A4 format labeled ‘The magazine for men who mean business’, with the first issue boasting ‘New look, new content – try us for size’. It’s all very grown-up, seeking to create some clear space between it and the more mass end of the men’s market.

And it doesn’t do a bad job at it. Some of the content is pretty predictable (covers featuring Michelle Pfeiffer and James McAvoy to date), but it’s presented in a forward-thinking manner that involves more than a nod towards Monocle in its ruthless adherence to a single style-sheet. Featuring a grotesque sans serif and heavy horizontal rules, this one system is successfully applied throughout the whole magazine (below).

Nice touches include monochrome ‘Critics’ and ‘Business’ sections on uncoated paper, (blue and pink, respectively, below), and the vertical colour bar down the left of the front cover (above). This latter is a visual reference to The New Yorker, and you sense a lot of the thinking behind the look and feel, like Monocle, comes from that magazine.

They’ve even revived the age-old Esky character, below left, last seen in US Esquire in the sixties. In this usage it bears a passing resemblance to Monocle’s ‘M’ logotype, below right.

The new Esquire avoids the clichés of men’s magazines – the gaudy colours and flesh of FHM and Zoo, the heavily designed-to-look-designed structures of GQ – and tries to do simple things well. Essentially it succeeds, although the specially commissioned headline font Esquire07, with its clumsy swashes (below), is a mistake. The second issue saw a wise cooling down of some of the more extreme rule colours, and I hope further developments will see some of the rougher edges smoothed off.

The problem this new Esquire faces is that the magazine has chopped and changed so many times in its brief sixteen years that readers are confused by it. One of these incarnations took a similarly serious route, under previous editor Peter Howarth, which ended with his departure. Will NatMags give this latest re-launch more time? The magazine’s website is due to be re-launched soon and the extent to which that is developed will indicate how seriously the company is taking their sole men’s title.

But looking more generally at Esquire in relation to other recent design developments, I think it’s clear that there is a move toward simpler, cleaner editorial design among a part of the market interested in attracting the well-heeled, up-scale reader. I have to mention Monocle again here, not because I believe one or other title copied the other, but because together Esquire and Monocle are central to this trend. I’ve mentioned this in passing before, as has Michael at Boicozine recently, but it’s worth making it more explicit. As well as these two titles, Wallpaper*, and Man About Town can be included, along with Intelligent Life. None of these magazines are perfect, particularly the latter, but we are witnessing a refreshing moment where several magazines are swimming against the tide of over-familiar and formulaic design in today’s mainstream publishing. Most of these magazines come from a slightly leftfield direction, and it’s interesting to see Esquire, a more mainstream title from a certainly more mainstream publisher join in. I wonder how far and deep this trend will reach?