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In any event, "Dave" Smart has in Esquire what is currently one of the most spectacular successes in the U. S. magazine business. Just as men's fashion news led to the Esquire syndicate, so men's fashion news led to Esquire. David Smart and his partner William Hobart Weintraub began their association in 1927 by teaming up to provide the clothing industry with a journal called National Men's Wear Salesman, modeled on Printers' Ink, admen's trade magazine. Next Weintraub & Smart venture was the Gentleman's Quarterly, a smartly illustrated stylebook for men's shops to give away. As editor, they hired Arnold Gingrich, whose copy for Kuppenheimer clothes had caught Mr. Smart's eye.
Most important step in the development of the Weintraub-Smart fashion enterprise came when the partners proposed to send out men's style news by telephoto. First big tryout of the idea was on Nov. 18, 1930, the opening night of the late Florenz Ziegfeld's Smiles. A tremendous list of stars was to be greeted by a hand-picked audience of rich and dressy Manhattanites. When the Fairchild Publications, dominant in the textile-apparel newsfield, cast doubt on this stunt's authenticity, Editor Gingrich composed an angry letter of protest. Tough Mr. Weintraub, however, proposed as a sterner measure of retaliation an open invasion of the Fairchild Men's Wear field, an idea in which Dave Smart heartily concurred. Result was Apparel Arts, an elaborate quarterly for clothing salesmen, with actual samples of fabrics pasted in its pages.
Customers in stores got to stealing Apparel Arts. So Messrs. Weintraub, Smart & Gingrich fixed up Esquire for the laity at 50¢ a copy. For their success they became known to their style news competitors as "the breeches boys."
In its short life of 35 issues, Esquire has reached an estimated yearly gross income of some $5,000,000. Two of its stanchest contributors of mildly salacious drawings, Commercial Artist George Petty and E. Simms Campbell, a talented young Harlem Negro, have become famed through its pages. Besides his work in Esquire, Cartoonist Campbell draws the Hart Schafiner & Marx advertisements, contributes to other magazines, while Cartoonist Petty, whose young ladies look as though they were made of soft pink pastry, has an agreement with Old Gold cigarets, was voted Favorite Artist by Princeton's Class of 1936, last month helped judge Atlantic City's Beauty Contest (TIME, Sept. 21).