It’s been 20 years since anthropologists announced the discovery of a new and exciting species of human, emerging from the mists of the urban jungle. This creature was best observed in its natural habitat of New York City: drinking a Grey Goose martini at a chic watering hole, pausing by a window to smooth his perfectly coifed hair, disappearing around a corner on feet clad in stylish moc-toe boots, leaving behind nothing but an unsettling sense of sexual ambiguity and the lingering scent of Axe body spray. What was he? A man, yes, but not just a man. He was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, equal parts fascination and mockery. Behold: the metrosexual.
For those too young to have witnessed the great metrosexual panic of the late Nineties and early 2000s, it’s hard to explain just how worked up we all were by the realisation that there were men out there who conditioned their hair and moisturised their faces and wore clothes that actually fit, and yet who were somehow — and here, the mind boggled — not gay. In 2003, “metrosexual” was Word of the Year; in June, it was subject to a writeup in the New York Times Style, under the winking headline, “Metrosexuals Come Out”. By December, it was showing up in everything from celebrity profiles to book reviews to think pieces pondering whether the metrosexual was definitionally metropolitan, or whether men in the suburbs could get in on this new brand of masculinity too. Threaded through it all was a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop: the metrosexuals were into women, or so they said, but they obviously weren’t straight in the same sense as the cowboys, lumberjacks and plumbers of the world.
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