The efflorescence of men’s magazines in the UK lasted from about 1985 to 2010. You may recall their titles on newsagents’ shelves – Arena, GQ, Maxim, Esquire – near in time but now as defunct as the clay tablets of Babylon. They are gone, mostly, along with those newsagents’ shelves. It was a short-lived, almost parenthetical age. To revisit it in this new memoir by Dylan Jones, former editor of GQ, is to be transported to a world of scarcely imaginable glamour, of expense-account carelessness, of sybaritic indulgence unrivalled since the days of Rome. You can barely make it out through the rain of rose petals.
And squarely at the centre is Jones, scene-maker, master of the revels, and friend to the stars. Quite an irony today to read of his editorial perfectionism, and his insistence that every issue of his magazine should be an “art object”. This from the man who has just helped oversee the death warrant for the print edition of the 200-year-old London Evening Standard, having admitted to never reading a paper version of it himself. I wonder if it was not sufficiently “iconic” for him.
