“There’s no cigar smoke wafting through the pages,” Mr. Fielden plans to blow out fashion coverage, adding color and spectacle, the March issue features a model wearing a “cyberpunk meets Outward Bound” foul-weather ensemble by Prada, including pink scuba sneakers and a raincoat with a print inspired by Google Earth, that might give Jared Leto pause. That talk show host was hardly the only peacock to grace the pages of that issue. Fielden said, a trace of his Texas twang poking through. “I mean, here’s this bloke from England who’s a little overweight, with his zaftig charisma showing up, taking the latest slot that potheads and college students watch, and suddenly he’s become a viral sensation that’s global,” Mr. Fielden said, the kind of man who looks totally at home in a red custom-made Gucci suit and silk Gucci loafers embroidered with tigers, as he appears in the issue. “He represents a lot of what I’m after,” he said, explaining that his version of Esquire “is aimed at a reader who’s an upstart, an iconoclast, an independent thinker, the most charming guy in the room.”Ī portly Everyman with an impish wit, Mr. Corden was a good model for the new Esquire man. The cover subject is not a chiseled hunk in the mold of Ryan Gosling or George Clooney, but James Corden, the host of CBS’s “Late Late Show.”Īfter seeing a Carpool Karaoke segment featuring Mr. That issue, complete with a redesign, is the first that fully shows his vision for the magazine. Fielden, wearing a blue windowpane Cifonelli suit, was reviewing the 102 editorial pages of the March issue, all taped on a wall before him. “How do you make that urgent to a younger generation?” Fielden, 48, sounding nostalgic as he reclined in a banquette, wearing a steel-bluel Ferragamo suit and sporting what may be the best head of male hair in the magazine industry, a cascade of artfully coifed curls that calls to mind both the belletrist whimsy of Oscar Wilde and the gunslinger gusto of Wild Bill Hickok. “There was a period of time when Esquire had a real literary charisma, and there was a culture that responded to it,” said Mr.
To that pocket-square-wearing, sidecar-sipping human known as the “Esquire man,” this was life as it was intended to be: a roomful of wags in natty suits throwing back cocktails and trading banter in one of Manhattan’s hottest restaurants, as willowy models and square-jawed movie stars circled the room.Īt Esquire magazine’s “Mavericks of Style” dinner, held at Le Coucou on a rainy night this past November, spirits were so high, and consumed so freely, that it might as well have been 1966 - doubly so, since Gay Talese, Esquire’s living monument to the New Journalism of the 1960s, was holding court, dry gin martini in hand, a few yards away from Jay Fielden, Esquire’s new editor in chief.