1. Andy Warhol – May 1969
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| A celebration of the Pop art movement, the cover featured Warhol being drop at a Campbell’s soup can. According to Lois, “When this article came up, I decided to show him drowning in his own soup. He knew it was just a friendly spoof on his original claim to fame.” |
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Jonathan Stone for Art-Sheep
George Lois was a genius graphic designer famous for his legendary covers of Esquire magazine. Satirizing and icon-shattering, these covers commented on important issues of the ’60s. Featured here you’ll see the most popular, controversial and delightful Esquire covers and their imaginative pictures.
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2. Muhammad Ali as a Martyr – April 1968
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| Muhammad Ali poses as a martyr for refusing to fight in the Vietnam war and the cover becomes a protest poster hung in college dorms all over America |
3. The Vietnam War – October 1966
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| The words on the cover were from an article written by John Sack, who reported on a U.S. soldier’s reaction upon discovering they had killed a Vietnamese child during a search-and-destroy mission. |
4. Ursula Andres as a symbol for domestic violence – July 1967
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| Bond girl Ursula Andress posed as a symbol of domestic violence that was still a taboo topic at the time. |
5. A satirical cover of Nixon – May 1968
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| Satirizing Nixon’s run up to the 1968 election. |
6. Stewardesses – February 1964
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| One of Esquire’s biggest selling issues on the newsstands, it features forty stewardesses from fifteen international airlines. |
7. Sonny Liston as “The First Black Santa” – December 1963
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| “All hell broke loose when the cover came out.” |
8. An homage issue – October 1968
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| For its 35th anniversary, Esquire featured JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on its cover, watching over Arlington National Cemetery, like a “dream-like epitaph on the murder of American goodness.” |
9. Claudia Cardinale – December 1966
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10. A Truman Capote cover – December 1967
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| Commenting on Truman Capote’s infamous 1966 masked ball when he invited 540 of his closest friends! |
11. The face of a hero – September 1965
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| A composition of all four leading heroes for every American college student of the 1960s, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Fidel Castro, creating the “Ultimate American Hero” |
12. American kids growing up – May 1967
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| The incident as headlined on the cover was “the moment when an all-American kid started to grow up with live violence in his carpeted den, complete with an all-American hamburger and Coke,” according to Lois. |
13. The masculinization of the American woman – March 1965
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| “Was there a point where sexual equality would end and confusion begin?” wondered Lois, influenced by the slowly growing feminist movement. Italian actress Virna Lisi posed for the cover. |
14. The fashionable cover – October 1963
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15. JFK several months after his assassination – June 1964
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| According to Lois, it “…showed the opposite symbolism-of Kennedy himself, crying for his lost destiny.” |
