Magazine editor who banned the nubile blonde quits

The editor who banned scantily-clad C-list celebrities from the cover of the upmarket men's magazine Esquire resigned yesterday after six years in charge.

Peter Howarth will leave in three months' time to pursue other interests. He challenged industry conventions two years ago when he renounced the prevailing laddish culture of the men's magazine market.

Instead of using the ubiquitous nubile blonde to attract readers, he took the decision to use men on the cover, and, most strikingly, black men.

Howarth claimed the decision had more than paid off, with the edition featuring the black American actor Samuel L Jackson proving the most popular of 2001.

Although the move initially lost him readers, he said the tactic was a deliberate ploy to attract the affluent, intelligent reader wanted by advertisers. It is a tactic similarly deployed by Vogue, which Howarth cited as a model.

The average age of his readers rose to 30, and 80 per cent came from the ABC1 categories, making his readership the oldest and most upmarket in men's magazines, he said.

But Howarth was derided by fellow editors such as Dylan Jones at GQ who said the tactic was not working. Circulation was static at just over 62,000 readers in the last round of audited magazine sales figures.

In terms of sales, Esquire comes half-way between its two upmarket rivals, GQ and Arena, but sells considerably fewer copies than the mainstream men's magazines which have kept sexy women on their covers. FHM sells more than 500,000 copies.

Duncan Edwards, the managing director of the National Magazine Company, said the firm was sorry Howarth was leaving. "Peter Howarth ... has given Esquire its distinctive grown-up positioning in the rather juvenile men's market," he said.