marksimpson.com

The Edi­tor
Busi­ness Week

Sir,

As the ‘father’ of the met­ro­sex­ual (and also appar­ently of his anti­thet­i­cal brother the ret­ro­sex­ual) my atten­tion was drawn to your cover arti­cle ‘Secrets of the male shop­per’ by Nanette Byrnes.

Since she talked so much about my off­spring, it would have been nice if Ms Byrnes had con­tacted me to check some of her metro fam­ily history.

When I first wrote about him in a UK news­pa­per in 1994 (‘Here come the mir­ror men’, Inde­pen­dent), I was not being insult­ing. Amused yes, but fondly so. Ambiva­lence was to come later.

Nor did the met­ro­sex­ual some­how ‘sur­face’ in the US ten years later — he was intro­duced State­side by his father in 2002 (‘Meet the met­ro­sex­ual’, Salon.com). If I’d known what was com­ing I’d have grounded him in the UK.

US mar­keters abducted him with false flat­tery and did their best to turn him into an annoy­ing fad, talk­ing inces­santly about the met­ro­sex­ual as ‘sen­si­tive’ and ‘in touch with his fem­i­nine side’. In fact, met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is only ‘fem­i­nine’ if you believe vanity’s name is (for­ever) Woman.

Iron­i­cally, the final proof that men are now as self-conscious as women is the so-called ret­ro­sex­ual back­lash against met­ro­sex­u­al­ity. As your fig­ures for boom­ing male con­sumerism show, it’s not really ret­ro­sex­ual at all. It’s faux–ret­ro­sex­ual. It’s Calvin Klein model Brad 6-pack Pitt lead­ing the rebel­lion against con­sumerism in Fight Club all over again.

‘Reg­u­lar guys’, what­ever they are/were, are fast becom­ing just another annoy­ing fad.

Sin­cerely,

Mark Simp­son