Today in great staged Instagram posts: Esquire’s editor-in-chief Jay Fielden announced he’s stepping down from his role. The men’s magazine editor is an endangered species, and rarely photographed in the wild outside of zoo conditions, so you’ll have to enjoy this shot, posted to Fielden’s Instagram earlier Thursday.
A replacement has not been named. His departure is part of what the Times calls “a dramatic reshuffling under Troy Young,” president of Hearst Magazines as of summer 2018. Prior to Esquire, Fielden was editor-in-chief of Town and Country, and held positions at The New Yorker, Vogue, and Men’s Vogue (RIP). The most notable product of Fielden’s three-year tenure may have been an article that never appeared in his magazine: an exposé on the director Bryan Singer that was apparently killed by nervous Hearst executives and later ran in The Atlantic.
But back to that Instagram photo! Fielden is staying on for one more issue, so it’s not exactly clear why he’s exiting the Hearst building with so many bags, or what, even, is in them. (Office supplies?) If the departing look seems familiar to you, it may be because you’re a Fielden Fiend who recently saw him post a remarkably similar Jack Nicholson photo to his feed:
Either way, he seems to have escaped the “digital Jacobins,” who he once complained (in an accidentally public DM) were coming for him with a “guillotine.” We look forward to the Nicholson looks he imitates next.
