Tomorrow, I unwisely wrote in these pages two and a bit years ago, belongs to us. The us I referenced were metrosexuals, sophisticated males who took trouble with their appearance, listened to women and suavely followed them to the table in the restaurant. We knew as much about arts, literature and cuisine as football and beer. We were, you know, just gay enough.

As for tomorrow, that, I suppose, must be now. But last week I feared I was wrong. Alarming publishing news from America made me wonder if metrosexuals had lost control of masculinity even before they had properly taken ownership. Condé Nast announced that it was closing Cargo, a male shopping magazine that, in the two years since its launch, had become the metrosexual source book. Its death followed those of Sync, which spoke to metrosexual man’s inner gadget-nerd, and Vitals, which sought to bring “the concierge” experience to readers’ lives.

There was a strong scent of not so-expensive Schadenfreude surrounding this latest closure. The media gossip site Gawker glossed: “Let it be said that we’re never happy to see a magazine die. But if this signifies the larger, official and irreversible death of the metrosexual, well, it’s a noble sacrifice.”

My 2003 piece had been inspired by a new book called The Metrosexual Guide to Style packed with advice for the average grunt on wardrobe, skincare, and the cultural references he could be expected to know. Shortly afterwards the makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hit Britain and metrosexuality was everywhere. The term, I later learnt, had been invented back in 1994 by Mark Simpson (see accompanying piece), who had coined it to define a new type of narcissist. At the time he outed David Beckham, Brad Pitt and SpiderMan as metrosexuals. Nine years on, we added Tony Blair, Vittorio Radice and Thierry Henry.

I had not realised the offence I would cause. Within days, my colleague Jonathan Gornall, whose column trades under the name Microwave Man, asked in print who would come off better in a punch-up, “Billen’s Brylcreem Boys” or “Microwave Man’s Real Men”.

The Sun’s Dominic Mohan protested: “Women don’t want to go out with a preening ponce who spends longer in the bedroom and looks better groomed than they do. Believe me, if they did, Posh Spice wouldn’t look so miserable all the time.”

Even the women whom we were meant to be metrosexualising ourselves for joined the attack, saying that, beneath the veneer, metrosexuals still chased 23-year-olds and made more money than they did. By last autumn Marian Salzman, an ad agency guru who had helped to popularise the word in the first place, was saying that there had been a “push-back” against the “softness of metrosexuality” and that men were no longer buying stuff “derivative of female products”. Nicholas Flocker, author of The Metrosexual Guide, went off and wrote The Hedonism Handbook.

So did Retrosexuality win after all? Is a man’s place in Spearmint Rhino rather than the salon (literary or hairdressing)? Will metrosexual Blair give way to analogue Brown in spirit as well as office? Is Wayne Rooney the Beckham de nos jours?

If we permit the world of glossy magazines to be our microcosm, the picture does not at first sight look good. In America three male shopping magazines close; in Britain the big story is the success of Zoo and Nuts, two lads’ mags that sell well over half a million copies a week. Their readership is male, young and straddles the class divide from A1 to D. Zoo this week carries eight pages of page-three models cavorting in bed together. With a cover price of 60p, a strapline explains, “that’s only 30p per ‘lesbian’.” Nuts features Saskia from Big Brother topless. “Gentlemen,” it warns, “prepare yourself for an unforgettable boob experience.”

Whatever else you’d call these magazines’ readers, it would not be metrosexual. And yet, if you turn enough pages, there are hints that metrosexuality may have permeated even their hides. Nuts’s editor, Phil Hilton, explained to me that market research had forced him to run two pages of fashion and grooming each week.

“I vividly remember sitting in somebody’s lounge in Newcastle with a group of men who could wax on for hours about the clothes they were wearing, the brands they were interested in and were no longer interested in, and the products they put on their hair. But with that did not go a whole lot of other things. They were not about to whip up an organic stir-fry and write poetry or visit a contemporary dance event.”

So are Nuts readers preening ponces or not? “They are probably preening but not ponce. You just want to have the hair you want, not the hair you woke up with.”

Nuts’s rival Zoo climbed a similar learning curve and now carries five pages of “style” each week. Despite the American magazine closures, Anthony Noguera, who oversees Zoo for Emap, sees no evidence that men see shopping as girly. “The reason Cargo closed was because it was a bloody awful magazine; crap from start to finish. It was confused. It was schizophrenic. It did not know if it was a Details rip-off or Maxim US. The covers changed from featuring sexy girls to tosser male models leaning out of Ferraris. Its failure was nothing to do with metrosexuality.”