Esquire A Content Analasys
At first glance, Esquire magazine seems harmless enough. In fact, I often thought of it as the magazine for an unenlightened J. Alfred Prufrock. J. Alfred Prufrock was the dissatisfied upper class crybaby created by T. S. Eliot. Both Prufrock and Eliot himself choose to use initials instead of full names to accomplish an air of upper classmanship. This is very much in the same vein as naming a magazine Esquire which, according to my computer thesaurus, is synonyms with such words as sir or aristocrat. Certainly not terms of the lower or middle class. Upon further inspection I find that to be somewhat true. The overall messages seem to reiterate certain ideals held valuable among the young, urban, professional male. The magazine frequently deals with that lifestyle by focussing on fashion, sex, top of the notch booze, designer cars and even preys on their fears with fitness and hair saving products. To begin my research I literally tore apart my copy of the March 1999 Esquire. Once all pages were ripped out I began to organize them and make calculations and judgements upon that. All in all, including cover pages and ads, there were 201 total pages. Of these 201 pages the advertisements add
7% of the ads were for personal products. The men they pander too are to urban professionals and apparently always aiming to look their best. There weren’t any real surprises to be honest. October of 1998 was also close with 74 pages of 185 equaling 40% approximately. All of their slants and images are presented in an extremely straight forward manner with the exception of the “Man at His Best” features. cover, contents, credits and contributor bios), feature articles and serious journalism. Each time they run this feature they have a different celebrity write it up. The question remains, are they producing these ideals or simply reiterating them? I believe for the most part that they just try to offer what they think the audience was. Fashionable cars only totaled out to 9. The one spread of a female inside the issue was fully dressed in a hockey uniform and read more like a praise of her versatility. There were forty different fashion companies endorsed and of those, 25% of the companies advertised somewhere in this issue.
Common topics in this essay:
Navigator Chrysler,
Prufrock Eliot,
Boy Scout,
Pinot Noir,
Alcohol Tobacco,
St Patty’s,
Davidoff Company,
Mercedes Benz-S,
Larry Flynt,
Esquire Accompanying,
“man best”,
“man best” section,
29 pages,
ads tobacco,
fashion sex,
tobacco ads,
considering audience,
best” section,
aids epidemic,
tobacco cars,
201 pages,
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