Marty and Elliot insist that when it comes to GANT products, only the best is acceptable. Marty and Elliot understood the family business. They identified with it so much they even changed their own name – Gantmacher became Gant. They also understood the power of advertising. They wanted their products to always be seen in the right places. That meant supplying only the best stores in town, and advertising in The New Yorker.
The first issue of The New Yorker had been published in February 1925 with a drawing of a monocle-wearing dandy on the cover. It was a new kind of magazine that appealed to a new kind of readership.
“The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” wrote founding editor Harold Ross. “It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience.”
It attracted the best and wittiest writers, everyone from J. D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov to Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. It was not only choosy about which writers it would publish, but also which adverts it would run. It declined commercials that didn’t fit the magazine’s tone.
One of the companies that did fit the bill was GANT. At first all Marty and Elliot could afford were 1/8 page black-and-white ads every three months. Gradually they moved up to bigger and more frequent ads, featuring the oxford shirt in four different photos and four different situations, then ultimately running eight full-color ads in one year. The campaign spread the message that GANT produced the sort of shirts that the bright young sophisticates of the day were wearing.
