Immature Magazines Borrow; Mature Magazines Pay Homage
Left, RADAR (via Gawker); Right, Esquire, April 1968.
Update: It turns out that the art director with the balls to rip off George Lois' legendary Esquire cover was none other than... George Lois. (Very sneaky, RADAR!)
From a press release just received at Mob HQ:
--Matt HaberRadar magazine's Maer Roshan has brought legendary adman and cover designer genius George Lois out of retirement to design the issue's September/October issue, on sale August 16th. [...] "Magazines don't even try to do covers with actual ideas any more," Lois says in the forthcoming issue of Radar. "I get calls from these big magazine conferences -- always some big goddamn deal -- and they're always the same thing: 'Could you come down, George, and make a speech about why all magazine covers suck?' Screw that! Everybody knows that already! You can't just slap a picture of Nicole Kidman on your cover and expect people to say, 'Wow! What a cover!' It's just another picture of Nicole. Who gives a shit?"
