Meet the 4D Man

WHAT a piece of work is a man?” pondered the eponymous foot-dragging prince in Shakepeare’s Hamlet, and some 400 years later the world — or, at the very least, the advertising world — is still grappling with that same question.

Over the past 30 years, men have been repackaged and rebranded more times than washing powder, be it as Urban Playboy, The New Man, The New Lad, the Metrosexual (and its inverted mirror image, the Retrosexual), not to mention — as one British newspaper recently deigned — The Stray: the straight man with a gay sensibility.

Into this ever-evolving realm of “men-ufactured” labels comes the recently-coined 4D Man, or four-dimensional man. This latest tag has been identified by marketing research — big shock there — for Bauer media in the UK as the publishing company was launching Gaz7etta, its own mini-male version of Grazia magazine.