Esquire Mens Bold Editorial

Esquire Men's Bold Editorial

From 1962 to 1972, art director George Lois created 92 covers for Esquire magazine that are collectively regarded as the most consistently brilliant decade of cover design in the history of American magazines. Working with photographer Carl Fischer and with Esquire's editors Harold Hayes and Don Erickson, Lois used the magazine cover as a vehicle for conceptual argument - a single image that made a political or cultural statement that the cover line could not improve.

George Lois and the Conceptual Cover

Lois had come from advertising - he was a co-founder of the agency Papert Koenig Lois and later Lois Holland Callaway - and he brought an advertising art director's discipline to editorial design: the cover was a thirty-second argument, not a decoration. The image had to communicate before the reader's eyes settled enough to read the text.

The 1968 cover depicting Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian, his body pierced by arrows, was a response to Ali's treatment by the U.S. draft board. The 1963 cover showing a model going limp in Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can - the soup can larger than the model - interrogated celebrity and commodification a decade before it was fashionable to do so. The 1969 cover of Richard Nixon being prepared for television makeup captured the transformation of politics into performance at the moment Nixon was preparing for his first presidential television appearance.

Each cover was a collaboration between concept and image: Lois would develop the idea, Fischer would execute the photography with theatrical precision. The backgrounds were often pure - white, black, a single color - because the concept required nothing else.

Typography and the Esquire Identity

Esquire's masthead typography through the Lois era used Caslon - the English serif with American associations going back to the Declaration of Independence - in a format that communicated cultural authority without pretension. The cover lines were brief, sometimes absent when the image was strong enough to stand alone. The typographic restraint was integral to the design: adding more words would have diluted the concept.

Legacy

Lois's Esquire covers are the reference point for editorial designers worldwide. Rolling Stone under Annie Leibovitz's long relationship (from 1970), New York magazine under Milton Glaser's early guidance, and the entire British tradition of conceptual magazine covers - i-D, The Face, Dazed and Confused - operate in the space Lois defined.