Mark Simpson on how he fathered a city of metrosexuals

'Oh, here is London/home of the brash, outrageous and free/You are repressed but you're remarkably dressed' - Morrissey, 'Hairdresser on Fire'.

Giddy London with its bright lights, thronging crowds and highly reflective shop windows is the birthplace of many a famous star. Including a 16-year-old nicely-turned-out self-regarding young man with large pectoral muscles. He conquered the globe in the noughties. With his looks. I'm talking, of course, about the metrosexual.

And I should know. I'm the impossibly pretty bastard's (deadbeat) dad. Back in 1994 I was asked by the Independent to attend a men's style exhibition organised by GQ magazine. Packed with stands promoting fashion and vanity products, it was called, with no irony, 'It's a Man's World'. It was also full of the kind of fashionably dressed, svelte young men with really great skin and hair that in the '80s you'd only see in Levi's adverts and GQ fashion shoots. Or gay bars.

But most of the ones I buttonholed that day were straight. Having just published a book about the impact of consumerism and media objectification on masculinity called 'Male Impersonators',
I decided that I'd seen the future - and that it was moisturised.

Using the word 'metrosexual' - apparently its first appearance in print - to describe this touching masculine yen to be adorable, this male desire to be desired, I announced that male vanity was finally coming out from its walk-in closet and finally speaking of the self-love that once dared not speak its name.

No one believed me, of course. Everyone was in New Lad denial back then, and blinkered when it came to what was happening to men and why they were spending so long in the bathroom. It wasn't until I returned to the subject in 2002 for Salon.com, in a shiny new century, surrounded by even shinier new metrosexuals, that I persuaded other people to finally notice them too.

Because this time I named names - outing London boy David Beckham as the world's biggest, most flaming metrosexual. And then everyone went. 'Oh, right. One of those!'

In hindsight, London with its rich history of peacocking post-war youth cults, such as Teds, mods, punks and new romantics, and its high concentration of fashion and media (and journos like me) had to be the birthplace of the metrosexual.

David 'other boys check you out' Bowie was the glittery '70s prophet of metrosexuality - David 'I love my gay fans' Beckham its giant Armani-clad lunch-box fulfilment in an age when footballers are the new pop stars, and are plastered with their legs apart on the side of buses.

London was also the capital of metrosexy because of its rich gay history. That GQ exhibition in 1994 was billed as the first men's style exhibition, but this in fact wasn't true. The Gay Lifestyles Exhibition had already been running in London for three years, essentially offering a very similar, if slightly less corporate experience. After all, commercially speaking, the 'gay lifestyle' was about a single young man living in the metropolis and taking himself as his own love-object and pleasure as his sexual aim.

Likewise it was gay men who had pioneered - and made an obsession out of - the appreciation of male aesthetics. I'm not sure GQ wanted you to know this, but male homosexuality was one of the prototypes for metrosexuality. Steve and Paul, a fashionably dressed twentysomething gay couple I ran into that day at 'It's a Man's World' were worried about that association too. 'It's a shame you picked us to talk to,' they said. '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.'

Fat chance of that happening now, lads.