I knew that I wanted to end up in this world in some capacity.”[4] He attended Boston University,[5] where he met the literary critic Christopher Ricks, who became his academic adviser.
Fielden gave the Men's Vogue the tagline, “Style is How You Live,”[13] describing the magazine in the first editor's letter, as combining “a far-reaching curiosity about the world with an appreciation of the kind of style that emanates from accomplishment and substance.”[14] Writing about the magazine's first issue in The New York Times, fashion critic Cathy Horyn described the magazine as “a paean to the urbanity of The New Yorker, the glamour of Vogue and the cosmopolitan sparkle of Esquire of the late 1960s and early 1970s before, it seems, the world was divided into gay and straight.”[15] Men's Vogue championed African-Americans, featuring Barack Obama on the cover twice.
[16] He said his goal was to bring “a lot of people under the tent” of a “a snooty, exclusionary magazine.”[17] He later said, “I gave Town & Country some teeth, reporting on behavior that wasn't always that which, well, Emily Post would approve, like having an evening toke instead of a Scotch on the rocks.”[18] In 2014, Fielden convinced novelist Jay McInerney to bring his column about wine from the Wall Street Journal to Town & Country.
In 2014, he founded the Town & Country Philanthropy Summit, which has featured speakers such as Michael Bloomberg, Chelsea Clinton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bradley Cooper, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Geoffrey Canada.
In an interview with The New York Times, Fielden described his vision of the magazine: “There's no cigar smoke wafting through the pages, and the obligatory three B's are gone, too — brown liquor, boxing and bullfighting.”[22] In October 2016, Felden published an exposé in Esquire by journalist Christopher Glazek, chronicling how the Sackler family profited from the opioid epidemic.
[23] In March 2019, The New York Times reported, “While the drug's potential for abuse has been known for two decades, only recently has Purdue's controlling family come under intense scrutiny.
Their role in marketing the drug, despite its perils, was the focus of articles in The New Yorker and Esquire in 2017.”[24] During Felden's tenure, Esquire's March 2019 cover of a Wisconsin high-school senior entitled “An American Boy: What it's like to grow up white, middle class, and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity, #MeToo, and a divided country” caused controversy.
[28] Journalist Kate Rosman posted a tweet, saying, “It's a story that matters to a lot of parents of kind, empathetic boys who feel confused by society's assumptions that they're anti women/girls/LGBQT [sic], etc.
We shouldn't say “who cares” about an entire demographic.”[29] In February, 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a piece questioning why Esquire did not end up publishing an exposé on accusations of pedophilia by the director Bryan Singer.
The chatter was renewed after some public blowback for a cover story on a white, politically conservative teen.”[33] Fielden's departure was announced through an Instagram post, in which he included a photograph of himself leaving the Hearst Building with several bags.
He accompanied his photo with a 300-word blurb recounting his experience at the company and his plans for the future (which include cooking his kids breakfast as his wife sleeps in).