NEW YORK — “He was the best in the business,” said Ralph Lauren Monday on the death of former GQ editor in chief Art Cooper.
“Under him,” Lauren continued, “GQ became the fashion authority for men. He put it together in a way that men could relate to, even those who shied away from fashion. He made it cool for men to love clothes.”
Lauren expressed the sentiments of designers and editors alike who were saddened by the death of one of the most influential editors of his generation. Cooper, age 65, suffered a fatal stroke after lunching at the Four Seasons on Thursday and died at 3 p.m. Monday at New York Hospital. The family declined to reveal funeral details, but a memorial service is planned, although details are not yet confirmed.
“Art commemorated his 20-year tenure with Condé Nast last week,” said S.I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Advance Publications, in a statement. “He was a great editor and an important part of our company’s rich history. Art transformed GQ into the quintessential magazine for men — reflecting his own interests ranging from fashion to literature.” He added, “Art’s wonderful life and his love of publishing will remain in our memories for a long time to come.”
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Steven T. Florio, ceo of Condé Nast, said, “He taught at least two generations of men how to live their lives with style. The clothes they should wear; the wines they should drink; the women they should surround themselves with; the way you live your life with style and grace. And he embodied that. He was a good guy who worked really hard.”
“He always kept the magazine true to what he believed it should be,” said Calvin Klein. “We’d talk about it — the competition, what’s happening with some magazines today. They will cheapen themselves to get circulation. He just bucked that trend. He believed in the integrity of GQ and refused to conform.”
Donatella Versace said, “Art was a legend, but more importantly, he was a gentleman. He left an indelible mark on both the publishing world and the men’s fashion industry.”
A fixture over the years at the men’s collections in Milan and Paris — as well as the Four Seasons — Cooper was a man who indulged fully in the good life, whether food, fashion or literature. And until shortly before his death, he loved his martinis — dry. Even he acknowledged his taste for the finer things in his final column as GQ’s editor, which is in the June issue now on newsstands. “The record shows I took the clothes, and did it my way,” he wrote, acknowledging one of his heroes, Frank Sinatra.
“When you had lunch with him, you sat down and he had two martinis waiting on the table,” said his protégé, David Granger, current editor in chief of Esquire. “Very cold. Very dry.”
A sweeping career path took Cooper from the political beat at the Harrisburg Patriot in 1964 to a correspondent’s post at Time magazine. He then joined Newsweek in 1967 and later ascended to the top of the profession as one of the longest-running and innovative editors at Condé Nast Publications. In the process, GQ was nominated for numerous awards, including 27 National Magazine Awards, winning three. Cooper was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in January. Awards aside, he was one of the few editors able to achieve a unique accomplishment: literally turning his magazine’s title into an adjective that became part of the American vernacular.
“He taught me that if you don’t take your brand and run with it, if you don’t make your magazine a word that could be in the Oxford English Dictionary — as in, ‘you’re so GQ’ — then you’re not doing something right,” said Kate White, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, who worked for Cooper at Family Weekly.
Linda Wells, editor in chief of Allure and another Cooper protégé, echoed that sentiment. “Fashion is something that when Art came along, men were embarassed about. They thought that to be into fashion — to be fashionable — was to be a dandy, and he turned that upside down, making the letters ‘GQ’ an adjective and an adjective that was the highest compliment. His work, I’m sure, paved the way for Miami Vice, where two macho guys were wearing linen jackets and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. We look back on it now and laugh, but it was hot at the time.”
Cooper’s successor at GQ, Jim Nelson, remembered, “He was an editor with an unprecedented instinct for a story. He was always on his game. The best things in the magazine always came from his gut and his willingness to take risks.
“When I came here from Harper’s, there was a story from Allan Gurganus called ‘Thirty Dildos’ and it was a pretty racy piece of fiction. Too racy for Harper’s. And it was just a great short story. We had been about to publish it and the editors just got cold feet. It took Art two seconds; he just read it and he knew he would publish it. He was totally fearless that way.”
Tom Junod, who won the National Magazine Award under Cooper, said, “Art was just this guy who made you feel that you could take on the world. He instilled a feeling while you were at GQ that, at the 5 o’clock cocktails or wherever, there was this real, knights-at-the-round-table feeling. If you wanted that fantasy of New York magazine life — what it could be and should be — you appreciated that he grew up wanting that, too.”
By 1971, while serving as an editor and culture critic at Newsweek, Cooper won the prestigious Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. In 1976, Cooper was named editor at Penthouse, which was trying to reinvent itself as a magazine known for its articles as well as its centerfolds. The relationship was short lived.
His next gig went better. In 1978, he moved to Family Weekly, a sleepy 13 million-circulation magazine that was the forerunner to USA Weekend. But if the publication had historically been a yawn, Cooper immediately began to jazz it up, convincing a slew of high-profile writers like James Michener and Gail Sheehy to write for the supplement.
“It wasn’t Vanity Fair at the time,” said Cosmopolitan’s White. But if he was interviewing you for a job, “he made it sound like the finest publication in the United States and that you’d be a fool not to go there. He was so proud of everything he did.”
In 1983, he got the call of his life.
Cooper came to Condé Nast to edit Gentleman’s Quarterly, at the time floundering as a proto-gay publication with little mainstream appeal. He quickly changed that. Over the course of his career with the magazine, GQ grew from a circulation of 565,000 to more than 750,000. He balanced style and fashion with literary sophistication, bringing writers like Joe Queenan, David Halberstam, Gay Talese and Glenn O’Brien to its pages and mentoring editors who included Esquire’s Granger, GQ’s Nelson, Brandon Holley of Ellegirl and Allure’s Wells.
“He very quietly took over GQ, which was not a good magazine, and without all the sturm und drang, made it a very elegant magazine of good writing by good people,” said Halberstam. “There was a systematic upgrade in terms of the texture there. It became very much a writer’s magazine. Each issue there would be two to three articles you wanted to read and it always delivered. It was a magazine you wanted to be in.”
“He always had a cool slant on the magazine,” said British designer Sir Paul Smith. “It wasn’t just about fashion, but about art, music and international topics.”
During his tenure, he helped usher in the boxy monochromatic suits of Giorgio Armani in the Eighties and balanced it with the all-American ideals of Ralph Lauren. In the Nineties, his pages changed as designers like Tom Ford came up, but GQ’s supremacy as a fashion authority remained unparalleled.
But in 1997, British publisher Felix Dennis brought U.K.-based beer-and-babes magazine Maxim to the United States. Cooper laughed off the competition, saying at the time, “Maxim is a magazine for men who not only move their lips when they read, they drool when they read.”
Its intellectual merits notwithstanding, the magazine burned a trail through the men’s industry. Two years later, its newsstand circulation had doubled to more than 800,000, while Dennis launched Stuff, which also surpassed GQ on the newsstand. The launch of Emap’s FHM didn’t help GQ, either. In 1997, GQ sold a monthly average of 336,000 copies. By June 2002, the magazine’s newsstand circulation had dropped to 188,000, off 44 percent, though the numbers rebounded slightly by the end of the year to just more than 200,000. In February 2003, Cooper stepped down from the magazine and disclosed plans to write a book.
But it was the way in which Cooper fused fashion and literary journalism that made him a star.
“What Art did for fashion,” said his colleague, Graydon Carter, “was to make it plausible. He took GQ from being almost a fashion trade magazine and he turned it into a very esteemed general-interest magazine.”
“Art figured if he had a fashion-minded reader, he’d be intelligent, too,” said Linda Beauchamp, owner of the management consultant firm, Vision and Commerce, who knew Cooper from her earlier days at Saks Fifth Avenue.
She said he often ran provocative stories and did some interesting things with Alan Richman, who wrote food stories. “When it all turned to beer and babes, that was out of his league. He was of a much more refined generation,” said Beauchamp. “He’d have a constant table at Ciebreu in Florence. He’d be there five nights a week and even at lunch.”
Designer Alan Flusser recalled Cooper’s retirement party at the Four Seasons last month, where Condé Nast Publications presented him with round-trip tickets for him and his wife, Amy (a former editor in chief of Mademoiselle), to take a trip around the world.
“It was pretty hysterical,” said Flusser. “S.I. Newhouse and Steve Florio spoke, and they all made fun of each other, saying, ‘Now Art would have to pay for his own lunches.’”
Joseph Abboud added, “I loved Art. He was really responsible for the first major article done on me as a designer. He put me on the map.
“He was so vital. I thought Art brought [to the magazine] style with masculinity. So often there’s that terrible notion that fashion is feminine and unmanly. Art brought baseball, martinis and the Four Seasons along with great taste. He lived life as a man of style. He was one of my heroes. He was GQ.
Cooper is survived by his wife, Amy Levin Cooper.