GQ began as a trade magazine for salesmen that shoppers kept stealing from stores.
In 1931 two publishers, David Smart and William Weintraub, launched Apparel Arts, a quarterly for clothing salesmen with fabric samples pasted into its pages. Shoppers kept walking off with it, so in 1933 the partners started a magazine for the public. They called it Esquire. Apparel Arts became Gentlemen’s Quarterly, then GQ, and by the 1980s it was Esquire’s rival.
GQ on Brandseum