marksimpson.com

The Edi­tor
Sun­day Tele­graph
Sir,

As the ‘father’ of the met­ro­sex­ual, I was fas­ci­nated to read (‘Ora­cle worker’; Jan 7, 2007) that an Amer­i­can ad-exec called Mar­ian Salz­man is ‘a step ahead of the rest of us’ and a lead­ing ‘futur­ol­o­gist’ because she ‘pre­dicted the rise of met­ro­sex­u­als’, a species she ‘dreamt up’ for a cam­paign for Per­oni beer in 2003.

It’s very kind of this mar­keter to try — yet again - to take respon­si­bil­ity for the met­ro­sex­ual, but as that annoy­ing thing called Google shows, I first wrote about this High Street nar­cis­sist in an arti­cle for the Inde­pen­dent in 1994 (‘Here come the mir­ror men’), in which I pre­dicted that met­ro­sex­u­al­ity was the facial future of men.  As I recall, nei­ther New York ad-women nor Per­oni beer were involved in his con­cep­tion – nor my prediction.

I can’t deny either that I returned to the sub­ject in 2002 in an essay (‘Meet the met­ro­sex­ual’) for America’s pop­u­lar online mag­a­zine Salon, to point out how the pre­dicted met­ro­sex­ual future had already arrived, cit­ing David Beck­ham as the impec­ca­ble proof.  Accord­ing to neol­o­gism track­ers such as WordSpy.com, this was the jumping-off point for the cur­rent ubiq­uity of the word.  Salzman’s self­less ‘adop­tion’ of the metrokid occurred the fol­low­ing year. 

Which, amongst other things, makes this Amer­i­can ‘futur­ol­o­gist’ who is ‘a step ahead of the rest of us’ about, oh, nine years behind British journalism.

Sin­cerely,

Mark Simp­son