Lauren’s wide-screen-Americana vision was decidedly unswish, as was the designer himself, but in GQ he found a publication simpatico with his desire to make men more attractive-to liberate them from the sack-suit orthodoxy that predominated on one end of the sartorial spectrum and the polyester ghastliness that predominated on the other. It was the only book at the time that had a statement, and therefore it became a leader,” says Ralph Lauren. “ GQ made a strong statement about menswear. But the gay sensibility was unmistakable: the recurrence of the word rugged in headlines the prescient interest in minimalist home decor the “Every Night Fever” disco-stomp pictorial from 1978, with models in Capezios dancing in a parking lot illuminated by the headlights of Lincoln limos. GQ was not explicitly a gay magazine, and its mandate, in fact, was to educate men of all persuasions about fashion and style. Jack Haber, the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1983, was a gay man, as were his two extraordinary art directors, Harry Coulianos, who served from 1971 to 1980, and Donald Sterzin, who started out as one of Coulianos’s deputies and eventually succeeded him, running the department until late 1983. (Only the gauche ever uttered the “54” part.) It was also, not to put too fine a point on it, a much gayer era of GQ. It was a time when the magazine had a smaller readership, measurable in the low six figures, and a smaller staff: a hedonistic, tight-knit group whose members socialized together after work, often in a pack, often at Studio.
Sometimes, there would even be a woman in the shot. And in the foreground, gorgeous creatures in very small bathing suits, frolicking in the surf, water beading seductively on supple flesh. Can we get a seaplane? Indeed we can get a seaplane! So there would be a seaplane-an expensive prop int he background.
#SUPER GAY MEN MAGAZINE SKIN#
Everyone’s hair had blond highlights everyone’s skin was fetchingly on t he cusp of a burn. Or if it wasn’t summer, it was at least an occasion to pack up and jet off to some summery locale, maybe Tahiti or Hawaii or t he Caribbean. It was always summer at GQ in the late 1970s.