Esquire recreate cover from 1965
Have I said I love magazine covers? Esquire’s May 2008 magazine reimagines the 1965 cover that pictured Italian actress Virna Lisi, in town filming Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra. Shaving. In the magazine shoot, not the film.
The story in Esquire is told by the art director at the time, George Lois, who they say “created some of the most memorable covers in the magazine’s history”. Lois’s commentary is stark about the mercantile pressures he felt at the time (but got away from):
“The ad guys hated it. It was too edgy. They were worried about losing clients.”
In the recently released 2nd edition of The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel focus on the same point: “how much influence advertisers have on the editorial content and the variety of means by which they exert their power.” One of my Level 2 magazine journalism students who’s doing some good features is also doing some work experience with a magazine over in Liverpool. He had an eye-opener the other day, when
he sat in on his first editorial meeting. “Do the ad team always have control like that?!” he asked. Why, yes they do.
I’m intrigued about the resonance that a magazine cover has when it pastiches, parodies, copies, morphs, etc, another image, either a previous magazine cover, or another famous marque or image. For example, the outcry over the recent Time Green cover and its pastiche of the famous Marines putting up the US flag at Iwo Jima.
Here, the two Esquire magazines are not so different: two women shaving, an image that was originally inspired by a 1965 article on the ‘masculinization of the American woman’. (Haven’t read the article).
There are a couple of obvious differences. Read more
