But seriously. Perhaps viewing male shows as a levelling of the playing field in the booming beauty industry would be a trifle simplistic. As a new socio-cultural grouping takes shape -- an urban herd spread across upmarket islands in increasingly wired metropolises across the globe, a herd which is subjected to common and instantly messaged fashion whims -- a thesis offered by a controversial new book merits recounting. In Stiffed, Susan Faludi details the current shift towards an "ornamental culture," resulting in "a society drained of context, saturated with a competitive individualism that has been robbed of craft or utility, and ruled by commercial values that revolve around who has the most, the best, the biggest, the fastest." This ornamental culture, with its consumerist excess and attendant entertainment industry, propels men towards "the conformism, passivity and consumerist mirror-gazing traditionallyheld to be feminine". Faludi argues that the additional male self-doubt resulting from the passage of the comforting affirmations of masculinity conferred by being the sole breadwinner, has led to a redefinition of manhood as something to be displayed in toned designer muscles, in transiently fashionable accessories. Male vanity, it would thus seem, is symptomatic of a crisis of masculinity, a crisis of self-esteem. It's a place women have inhabited for so long that it's become a way of life for them, what upheavals will male adjustment entail?

Feminists have tended to view the beauty myth as a sinister conspiracy by greedy companies to rake in profits as unsuspecting consumers go for yet another product to replicate in themselves an ever unattainable ideal. There may be a more asexual underpinning to the ornamental culture, but the enticing images of individuality are just as chimerical in the turn-of-the-century age of conformity, in the unrelenting struggle to keep up with the urban herd.