Who is the Alpha Man?

BY Dylan Jones 20 May 2009 (disclaimer *extract from G.Q.com)

If you were to look at the dozens of men's magazines that launched in the Nineties, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Alpha Male had - perhaps unwittingly, perhaps willingly - had some sort of frontal lobotomy. Ten years ago you couldn't be a man unless everything you consumed, everything you appreciated, everything you read, watched and listened to came complete with its own inverted commas. Big yellow foam inverted commas that proved you didn't take things too seriously.

Back in the Nineties, everything was ironic.

Ten years ago the Alpha Male was reduced to being interested only in gadgets, girls and beer. To be aspirational, to want to achieve in life was somehow considered to be uncool. You had to read a lads' magazine and you had to drink beer straight from the bottle and you had to pretend to be a new lad and you had to treat everything as a joke.

Yuppies were considered to be too Eighties, too associated with the Thatcher era, too associated with the good life. To lust after the better things in life - to learn languages, earn proper money, drive better cars and seduce more attractive, better educated women - you had to do it ironically, as though you didn't really care.

I wrote a piece about them at the time - the Untuckables, I called them, the sort of men who wandered around with a bottle of imported Belgian beer in one hand and a copy of Trouser Snake in the other. They were the reductive, unacceptable face of the new man.

Of course they're still here, but thankfully they are no longer part of the Zeitgeist.

At GQ, we've always attracted the Alpha Man. In fact we've never been embarrassed about being called aspirational. Never been embarrassed about being called yuppies in fact. Make no bones about it - GQ, the magazine I am the proud custodian of, is aimed at 21st-century yuppies. Men who are proud to call themselves Alpha Males.

So what does it mean to be an Alpha these days? Who are the Alpha role models? Who should we be emulating? Who should we be inviting round to our big, fat fancy bachelor pads? Well, the Alpha role models tend to be men with good credentials, men who excel at their professions, and men who look, sound and act like James Bond. In fact men who actually ARE James Bond. The Alpha male is devoted to success, devoted to self-improvement, and has a fundamental understanding of quality. And if he doesn't, he wants to find out how he can learn.

The crucial thing about the modern Alpha Male is the way in which he's become more sophisticated as a consumer. And this is because he's become more feminised. He isn't a metrosexual - I think that term was always more applicable to New York than anywhere in Britain - but he's become obsessed by luxury in all its many forms. Men have traditionally been a lot less sophisticated than women when it comes to consuming, especially at the top end of the market, and it's only recently that men - even Alpha men - have become acclimatised.

If, in the Eighties, the word designer became everyone's favourite prefix - used as a descriptive definition of everything from cars, suits and supermodels to personal organisers, lettuce and kitchen fittings - the new prefix is luxury, and it's one men have embraced with a newfound enthusiasm.

Believe me, Alpha Men are not just shallow consumers - they all strive for the best in everything - but we've learnt that to display our Alpha qualities, we can't just buy a fancy suit and drive a flash car. Alpha Man is becoming more adept at understanding the importance of provenance, of quality, and of true luxury.

But however sophisticated the Alpha Male becomes, however knowledgeable he becomes of the upper echelons of luxury consumption, he still needs validation, still needs confirmation that his consumer choices are the right ones to have, the right ones to make. Alpha Man still needs his friends to tell him he's cool, still needs a magazine or a newspaper to define him.

In many ways I think we've always been like this, but increasingly we need to know that the things we're buying, the things we're surrounding ourselves with are CORRECT. Have I bought the right suit? Am I driving the right car? Is my Blu-Ray the best on the market? What if I wait a few months? What digital camera should I buy?

Alpha male? You've found a home.