marksimpson.com

by Mark Simp­son (The Inde­pen­dent, 15 Novem­ber 1994)

Accord­ing to the New York Times, The Lon­don Times, Wordpsy.com and sev­eral dic­tio­nar­ies this arti­cle saw the first appear­ance of the word ‘met­ro­sex­ual’ in print.

‘IT’S BEEN KEPT under­ground for too long,’ observes one sharply dressed ‘met­ro­sex­ual’ in his early twen­ties. He has a per­fect com­plex­ion and pre­cisely gelled hair, and is inspect­ing a dis­play of costly after­shaves. ‘This exhi­bi­tion shows that male vanity’s finally com­ing out of the closet.’

And it’s busy fill­ing the new-found space in there with expen­sive clothes and acces­sories. ‘It’s a Man’s World — Britain’s first style exhi­bi­tion for men’, organ­ised by GQ mag­a­zine in Lon­don last week­end, proves that male nar­cis­sism is here and we’d bet­ter get used to it.

With pavil­ions rep­re­sent­ing top men’s fash­ion design­ers such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lau­ren and Gior­gio Armani and all the lat­est ‘groom­ing’ prod­ucts, It’s a Man’s World is, as Peter Stu­art, GQ pub­lisher, describes it, ‘a ter­rific shop­ping experience.’

Met­ro­sex­ual man, the sin­gle young man with a high dis­pos­able income, liv­ing or work­ing in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is per­haps the most promis­ing con­sumer mar­ket of the decade. In the Eight­ies he was only to be found inside fash­ion mag­a­zines such as GQ, in tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s every­where and he’s going shopping.

Met­ro­sex­ual man wears David­off ‘Cool Water’ after­shave (the one with the naked body­builder on the beach), Paul Smith jack­ets (Ryan Giggs wears them), cor­duroy shirts (Elvis wore them), chi­nos (Steve McQueen wore them), motor­cy­cle boots (Mar­lon Brando wore them), Calvin Klein under­wear (Marky Mark wears noth­ing else). Met­ro­sex­ual man is a com­mod­ity fetishist: a col­lec­tor of fan­tasies about the male sold to him by advertising.

Even the title of the exhi­bi­tion reveals how much times have changed. Not so long ago the expres­sion con­veyed the idea that the world belonged to that half which shaved. Nowa­days it seems to mean that you have to have the right après-rasage face cream.

On one of the stands at It’s a Mans World men lie supine while attrac­tive women in white coats rub lux­u­ri­ous mois­turis­ers into their faces; cam­eras dis­play the beauty treat­ment in close-up on banks of screens. Behold the met­ro­sex­ual pam­pered by women, tech­nol­ogy and cap­i­tal­ism! Behold the met­ro­sex­ual as star.

‘It feels nice. Basi­cally you get a free facial out of it,’ says James, a nineteen-year-old in natty jeans and an Ital­ian designer shirt, face aglow. ‘This stuff is a bit out of my price range, I’m a stu­dent,’ he con­fesses. ‘But if I had the money I might well buy the stuff.’

Is all this atten­tion to appear­ance a good thing? ‘Yes,’ says another young man, casually-but-carefully dressed in Cater­pil­lar boots, pris­tine Levi’s, T-shirt, sweat­shirt and bomber jacket. ‘If women take so much trou­ble over their appear­ance it’s only fair that men should take a bit more them­selves. My girl­friend would cer­tainly agree!’

But is it really about fair­ness? Or about what you see when you look in the mir­ror? ‘I sup­pose it’s mostly the way you feel,’ he admits.

A twenty-one-year-old stock man­ager in Gap agrees. ‘Men are just as vain as women and it’s a good thing that we’re able to show it these days.’

One of the major inter­ests behind met­ro­sex­ual pride, as the impres­sive list of spon­sors of this event (Dun­hill to Porsche, Tim­ber­land to Simpson’s of Pic­cadilly) shows, is big busi­ness. Met­ro­sex­u­als are the cre­ation of capitalism’s vora­cious appetite for new markets.

Tra­di­tion­ally het­ero­sex­ual men were the world’s worst con­sumers. All they bought was beer, fags and the occa­sional Durex, the Wife or ‘Mum’ bought every­thing else. In a con­sumerist world, het­ero­sex­ual men had no future. So they were replaced by the metrosexual.

The pro­mo­tion of met­ro­sex­u­al­ity was left to the men’s style press, mag­a­zines such as The Face, GQ, Esquire, Arena and FHM, the new media which took off in the Eight­ies and is still grow­ing (GQ gains 10,000 new read­ers every month). They filled their mag­a­zines with images of nar­cis­sis­tic young men sport­ing fash­ion­able clothes and acces­sories. And they per­suaded other young men to study them with a mix­ture of envy and desire.

Some peo­ple said unkind things. Amer­i­can GQ, for exam­pled, was pop­u­larly dubbed ‘Gay Quar­terly’. Lit­tle won­der that all these mag­a­zines — with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of The Face — address their read­er­ship as if none of them was homo­sex­ual or even bisex­ual. Lit­tle won­der that It’s a Man’s World organ­iser Peter Stu­art found it nec­es­sary to tell me that ‘all the men will bring their girlfriends.’

The ‘het­ero­sex­ual’ address of these mag­a­zines is a con­ven­tion. There to reas­sure the read­er­ship and their adver­tis­ers that their ‘unmanly’ pas­sions are in fact manly. Nev­er­the­less, the met­ro­sex­ual man con­tra­dicts the basic premise of tra­di­tional het­ero­sex­u­al­ity — that only women are looked at and only men do the look­ing. Met­ro­sex­ual man might pre­fer women, he might pre­fer men, but when all’s said and done noth­ing comes between him and his reflection.

Met­ro­sex­u­al­ity was of course, test-marketed on gay men — with enor­mous suc­cess. It’s a Man’s World is billed as the first men’s style exhi­bi­tion — but the Gay Lifestyles Exhi­bi­tion, which fea­tures fash­ion shows and a whole range of ‘mens prod­ucts’, is already in its third year. It was in the style-obsessed Eight­ies that the ‘gay lifestyle’ — the sin­gle man liv­ing in the metrop­o­lis and tak­ing him­self as his own love-object — became an aspi­ra­tion for non-homosexuals.

Per­haps this is why Atti­tude, a style mag­a­zine launched ear­lier this year felt able to break with con­ven­tion and address itself openly to gay men and ‘strays’ (gay act­ing straight men).

The New Lad bible ‘Loaded’, for all its fea­tures on sport, babes and sport, is (clos­eted) met­ro­sex­ual. Just as its anti-style is a style (last month it car­ried a sup­ple­ment for ‘no non­sense’ clothes, such as jeans and boots), it’s het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is so self-conscious, so stud­ied, that it’s actu­ally rather camp. New Lads, for all their burp­ing blokeish­ness, are just as much in love with their own image as any met­ro­sex­ual, they just haven’t come to terms yet.

Nor is met­ro­sex­u­al­ity a vice restricted to the pon­cey South­ern middle-classes. Work­ing class boys are, if any­thing, even more sus­cep­ti­ble to it. For exam­ple, New­cas­tle men between the ages of eigh­teen and thirty-five, appar­ently spend more money per head on clothes than any other men in Europe. If you live with your mother, as do many work­ing class boys until they marry, and, cru­cially, you have a job — your dis­pos­able income and your met­ro­sex­ual ten­den­cies are likely to be high.

And met­ro­sex­u­als have an amaz­ing sense of sol­i­dar­ity. Back at It’s a Man’s World, Steve and Paul, two fash­ion­ably dressed men-about-London in their late twen­ties, admit to spend­ing ‘a sub­stan­tial amount’ of their income on male cos­met­ics and clothes, and think that the exhi­bi­tion is ‘great’. But they’re wor­ried they might be let­ting the side down.

Says Steve: ‘It’s a shame you picked us to talk to because we’re gay and peo­ple might think that a show like this is just for gays and wouldn’t come. The thing is, straight men are just begin­ning to dis­cover the joys of shop­ping and we wouldn’t want to scare them off.’

This essay is col­lected in ‘Met­ro­sexy: A 21st Cen­tury Self-Love Story’