Every year at the same time in December, a small chunk of change leaves my bank account when the automatic renewals for nearly a dozen magazines I subscribe to. I love print and I wanted to make sure I never missed an issue of GQ and, of course, other magazines, so I set it up to all happen at the same time. This is a foolproof plan to spend a few hundred bucks on a supposedly dying medium, but, as I’ve learned, it’s also an opportunity to get yourself enough tote bags to knit an entire canvas quilt that could cover you on cold nights if you want it. Tote bags are great, we all love and need them at the exact moment when we don’t have them. But some of us—the magazine subscribers, the Strand-goers, the plebs in media or publishing, almost all New Yorkers—have too many totes and I, for one don’t usually need to add to my collection. Yet one that came post-subscription renewal caught my eye and I decided to keep it because, as I tell people like I’m talking about something from Chanel or Gucci, it’s a Glaser.
Specifically, it’s the New York magazine tote bag with a yellow bubble font by the magazine’s co-founder, Milton Glaser. I am a rabid sucker for good gear—both vintage and new—connected to publications. My list of wants includes anything old New Yorker or Spy, if you’re asking. And, yes, I’ve got a vintage New York Herald Tribune shirt that somebody made in the 1980s for whatever reason, over 20 years after the publication ceased to be because I’m basically Jean Seberg. But when the Glaser tote showed up at my home and I took it out of the package, I was thinking about how much I see Glaser all over the place these days.
If nothing else, you know Glaser’s iconic I Love New York logo. Beyond that, take your pick from fonts he created that designers still use to this day, to famous rock posters and art for shows like Mad Men. Glaser, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 91, was and is one of the leading figures of American graphic design. His particular style and sensibility—the playfulness, the embrace of psychedelic imagery, the colors he used—were far from the norm in the mid-1960s. By the start of the ‘70s, he had helped to mainstream the look and feel of the counterculture, blending it with a certain hip, urbane, literate sensibility. Glaser helped develop a distinct style suited for an emerging class of young, hip, sophisticated city-dwellers—or at least people that wanted to seem like they were young, hip, sophisticated city-dwellers. He gave smart style a healthy dose of pop and color, basically. “He was on the leading edge of the emergence of pop and psychedelic art as it made its way into communication,” Beth Kleber, Head of Archives at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, tells me. Glaser changed the way corporate and editorial design looked, “almost like a new kind of Modernism,” she adds.
But these days, Glaser’s sensibility is all over. You can get a knockoff I Love New York, or another city’s take on the image, pretty much anywhere, but there’s also the New Yawk hoodie that’s part of the latest collection Only NY did with the magazine Glaser co-founded, or the varsity jacket with his work stitched across the back. Every week, when there’s a new vintage drop from Fantasy Explosion, there’s a good chance you’ll see something with Glaser’s art on it, or by one of the many designers who were either influenced by him or were told to create something in a similar style.
And that’s where another part of the Glaser Effect can be seen beyond the streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn. It’s not so much his work as it is people are trying to capture the look of the sophisticated city-dweller from a bygone era that his work is so connected with. It can be seen on Instagram where Billy Crystal has caught up with Meg Ryan and Carrie Fisher as the beloved style icons from When Harry Met Sally. His whole look is truly the apex of the sort of sensibility Glaser helped cultivate. And, it should be noted, that Harry’s best friend, played by Bruno Kirby, is a journalist who writes for New York, the magazine Glaser founded. It’s noticeable whenever there’s a new Aimé Leon Dore drop, whether it’s the brand’s logo by itself on a longsleeve or the particular hues they go with for the striped shirts that sold out quickly look like they’d serve as a background for his work in the 1970s. Glaser was a New Yorker whose work is still always around if you live in the city (just look at a bottle of beer from Brooklyn Brewery and that’s his logo), and A.L.D. is a New York brand, so it makes sense that, even if it’s not intentional, there’s a bit of his influence there.
But the Glaser influence isn’t limited to logos. When Sebastian Stan and Seth Rogen stepped out on a red carpet in blush and burnt orange suits (respectively) earlier this month, or anything Donald Glover has been seen in as of late. Just look at any lookbook, from J. Crew to the rainbow of bengal stripe shirts available at Drake’s, there’s a real embrace of color after a lot of dark, both literally and metaphorically. If you look at a lot of design trends before Glaser—along with his colleagues at the famed Push Pin Studios firm he co-founded in 1954—you see a lot of black, brown and grey. Glaser really helped push the idea that color is good into American culture. Kleber—who just wrapped up a retrospective of his work—adds that it wasn’t just any single color he was interested in using. Glaser was ahead of the curve with the “unexpected color combinations that you see in a lot of his work.” Everywhere you look, whether it’s Throwing Fits selling bright, traffic cone orange or neon green shorts they pair with more muted blues and grays or the collaboration between END and Diadora that is rightly described as a “zesty” yellow, somebody is playing with different colors and combinations that really don’t make sense when you say them out loud. I’ve even been finding myself looking at some of his graphic design work and wondering how I could wear something as he’d create it. Since I’ve already got a tote bag, I’m off to a good start, but now I want to look more like somebody Glaser would have drawn and it seems I’m not the only one.