Thursday, November 11, 2010
Dandies Online: GQ Archive
We love GQ's cover archive going back to the '50's when it was Apparel Arts. It's pretty fascinating watching the progression:
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5 comments:
IN. LOVE.
I love the old one's the new's one's lost a lot in style.
Looking at all of these covers -- I've gone through the entire archive -- is a fascinating but rather depressing exercise, which I undertook because of my interest in menswear; I read "GQ" faithfully in my teens and twenties. I grew much less interested when celebrity covers and stories took over the magazine in late 1983. Prior to that, only celebrities who were truly linked to fine dressing (Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, JFK) ever made the cover; from 1983 on, Jeff Goldblum was good enough. And going through the slideshow after that point, you can easily see that every single year, fame mattered more in the magazine, and clothing mattered less. That alone tells us something about the drift of discourse in America.
..this was soo cool, very good job! I wonder how they react when items they recommended back then is no longer in style now..lol. It was a treat to see that.
http://thedebonairextraordinaire.blogspot.com/
So many people seem to say the old GQ was better, and I have to agree. I liked the period when there were very handsome male models on the cover (such as the gorgeous Thom Fleming on the cover you posted from 1981), or celebrities who dressed very well. The magazine seemed to focus more on clothes back then. I still subscribe to GQ and Esquire, but the European men's fashion magazines are so much better. They really focus on the beauty of men and their clothing, often with focus on their hair, beautiful skin, handsome faces, etc. The American mags really don't do that.
GQ occasionally does a little blurb entitled "GQ Regrets," where they talk about clothes they've recommended that they now realize were awful. They've done one on fur, for example, and they showed pictures of the fur coats and other things that they recommended in the original article.
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