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The gentleman starts its engines - Esquire Gentlemen fashion magazine

What do thrift-shop grunge, tie-dyed bell-bottoms, dog-sledding boots and $1,250-plus men's suits from Donna Karan and Calvin Klein have in common? And how about homeboys, hippies, dandies and the dressed-up denizens of Dallas?

The answer: they're all in Esquire Gentleman, Hearst Corporation's foray into men's consumer fashion magazines. Just a few days ago, 450,000 copies of Esquire Gentleman rolled off the press. While 300,000 copies went to newsstands (with a cover price of $3), 140,000 were mailed free to big-spending department-store card and charge-card holders in the 15 top U.S. markets. Another 10,000 went to executives at major retailers and fashion manufacturers.

As its name suggests, Esquire Gentleman is the offspring of Esquire--the latest spin-off from the 60-year-old men's magazine. Officially, Esquire Gentleman is a one-shot: in fact, however, it is--in typically cautious Hearst Corporation fashion--a trial balloon A second issue will be tested this fall.

Because fashion is a business of appearances, the look of the new magazine is of critical importance. "The challenge of the design," explains Esquire Gentleman's design director Roger Black, "is to see how we can blend the kind of awareness and fabness of fashion with a kind of regular-guy attitude. It s not easy."

Black, a former art director of Rolling Stone, The New York Times and Newsweek, has coordinated designs and redesigns for Smart Money, Out, The San Francisco Examiner, The Toronto Star and a number of publications in Italy and Central America. He is the design consultant for Esquire as well.

To maintain the Esquire family connection, Black chose to keep the Gentleman's body type the same as that of its parent: "We wanted to combine the literary feeling--the traditional, elegant magazine feeling--of Esquire with the feeling of a fashion magazine." The body copy is Esquire Village, while the headlines and some of the other display text are either Turino or Egiciano. "We used Turino to evoke a little fashion feeling--it has a definite fashion feeling--but to make it a little more gentlemanly, we used a condensed version," Black explains. "The other face is Egiciano. It's a slab serif face, which is now undergoing a whole new wave of popularity. So to give it our own look we made it condensed."

The effect is pleasant, but by no means radical. Certainly no one would mistake the new magazine for its more frenetic competitor, Details. "The main thing we were trying to do," says Black, "is to make the magazine accessible to men. The question is, how do you cover fashion and still keep a foot outside of Seventh Avenue--keep thinking like a regular guy, instead of some fashion victim?"

The jump to producing a separate publication using Esquire's and Hearst's resources and strengths--but devoted to men's fashion--makes sense, Black says. "Esquire's editor, Terry McDonell, felt that the fashion coverage in the magazine could be improved and expanded. But, at the same time, we couldn't really devote more pages to fashion without distorting the magazine that Esquire is," says Black.

And there was precedent for an Esquire spin-off. In the autumn of 1992, Hearst distributed 30,000 newsstand and 100,000 controlled copies of Esquire Sportsman, a 160-page special issue devoted to "the sporting life" produced primarily by the Esquire staff and designed by Black. A second issue is due out this month.

"Sportsman was very well received," explains Black. "So we said, |if that kind of special focus works, is there another area we could do special publications on?' Men's fashion was the first one that came to mind."

Esquire carries a great deal of advertising from menswear manufacturers, and the men's fashion category is remarkably uncluttered with publications. There are only two mainstream national consumer titles, 37-year-old Gentleman's Quarterly (GQ) and, also in the Conde Nast family, the relative newcomer Details, although Playboy and EM (Ebony Man) also devote significant coverage to fashion. (Fairchild Publications, men's title, M, folded last October and its 170,000 subscribers were picked up by GQ.)

In fact, it is even somewhat questionable whether GQ and Details constitute true "fashion" books. In recent years, GQ especially has worked hard to refocus its editorial as that of a general-interest men's magazine. In doing so, GQ has gone head-to-head with Esquire. Now Esquire appears to be shooting straight at GQ's old niche with the Gentleman. In fact, the 250-page premier issue seems to be targeting both competitors simultaneously, using a split cover run. one cover (shown on page 53) is aimed at younger readers--the Details audience--and another at their slightly older brothers--the GQ demographic. The two covers, distribution will split geographically by coast.

In early 1992 Esquire acquired (and Hearst re-acquired) an editor with significant experience and clout in the fashion biz: Woody Hochswender. Hochswender, who had served as copy chief for Hearst s Avon Books and features editor for Harper's Bazaar, was working as a fashion reporter and editor of a weekly column on the fashion industry for The New York Times. Last year, he rejoined Black and McDonell, whom he had worked with at Rolling Stone in the mid-70s, as a contributing writer for Esquire and editor of Esquire Gentleman. He also serves as a contributing editor for sister publication Harper's Bazaar

|Clothes you can actually buy'

Esquire Gentleman aims not just to cover a broad range of men's clothing-business, dress, casual and sports--but also to educate readers about style in general. There are photo layouts, service pieces and essays that place fashion in historical perspective.

The first issue's 80-page well contains a number of flashy photo spreads. One, shot in London by Michael Roberts, contrasts the retro trend of dressing as a dandy with that of dressing as a hippie. In another, action/sportswear is evocatively portrayed in black and white on location in Ecuador. The showpiece, photographed by Peter Beard with captions by Terry Southern, concerns a couple (the woman is the male model's real-life girlfriend) on a weekend in Miami. In this piece, African wildlife images of Beard's are juxtaposed with those taken on Miami Beach. The result, which includes some bare female breasts, has a great deal more impact than more traditional photos of male models.

On the service front there is a guide to the components of a complete spring wardrobe. For historical context, the Gentleman offers the 25 best-dressed men in American history, an article on Gary Cooper's sense of style written by Bill Blass and essays on the influence of gays and blacks in American men's fashion. Bringing the magazine down-home are photo essays on street fashion from Texas and California.

And, of course, there's the obligatory directory of where one can buy the featured apparel, but with a twist: The where-to-buy guide includes thumbnails of the actual pages, making it much more reader-friendly than the page-number-only listings of most fashion books.

And in a nod to its constituency of fashion-industry execs, the ad index lists not just the advertiser, but the ad agency, photographer and art director who produced the advertisement.

"That's the way we are working. Everything is about clothes that you can actually buy" says Black. "Clothes that are in the stores."

Has the time come when American men are truly interested in men's fashion? Will Esquire Gentleman become an institution like its progenitor? The answers lie with regular American guys, age 25 to 65.