Hong-Chi ShiauTaiwanese male readers had been looking to Japanese fashion magazines for inspiration since
the 1980s, with the Japanese publication Men’s Non-No becoming a reference for many. Men’s
UNO—literally meaning ‘number one for men’s fashion’ in Spanish and Italian—was founded
in Taiwan by a local magazine publisher and possessed a strong Japanese flavor. In fact, UNO is
commonly associated with “The UNO Fiber Neo Series,” a hair wax product in the Japanese
Shiseido cosmetic family that competes with Gatsby, also a Japanese brand, as two major players
in the men’s hair-styling product category in Taiwan and much of Asia. The resemblance and
connection between Men’s UNO and UNO hair wax—a male’s hair styling brand—is more
than just speculation. UNO’s key spokesman, Satoshi Tsumabuki, along with other Japanese
spokesmen such as Oguri Shun, Eita and Miura Haruma, were seasonally featuring Men’s UNO’s
advertisements, some of which ran up to four pages in length. With a strong resemblance to
Japan’s Men’s Non-No, Taiwan’s Men’s UNO was virtually a copycat publication that even readers
not well versed in men’s fashion readily associated with Men’s Non-No. The color, font and
style were almost identical, supporting suspicion that Men’s UNO was founded virtually as a
Taiwanese version of Men’s Non-No, seeking an edge by following a Japanese path while incor-
porating local insights and marketing itself as “genuinely Taiwanese men’s fashion.” Despite its
strong Japanese influence, Men’s UNO made efforts to localize, in part due to its accessibility
to local models and advertisers, and during its first two years its covers exclusively featured
Taiwanese male models. As a result of this differentiation in marketing, GQ, as an American
magazine, was quickly capitalized, becoming the chief advertising venue for Western fashion
brands in the men’s fashion sector, whereas Men’s Uno was conceived to be more down-to-earth
and local, functioning more like a fashion reference providing younger men in Taiwan with
guidance in everyday decisions regarding what to wear. This differentiating practice—a focus on
Western men’s fashion in GQ versus Japanese/East Asian in Men’s UNO—became a tacit rule
followed in the industry. Content analysis, conducted in 2012, supports this: GQ largely featured
Caucasian male models in its early years, between 1997 and 2000, whereas Men’s Uno exclusively
featured local models (Shiau 2012).
Men’s fashion magazines in Taiwan have managed to defy the near universal decrease in the
magazine advertising market. GQ grew by 8 percent in 2004 and 10 percent in 2005, while
Men’s UNO fared even more impressively over the same two years, growing by 44 percent and
25 percent, respectively (MBAT 2014). Overall, since the dawn of the new millennium all maga-
zines in all categories have faced a difficult time; but the advertising revenues of GQ and Men’s
UNO have grown so rapidly that men’s fashion in Taiwan has transformed from an invisible
magazine category to the fastest-growing one, reaching a scale nearly comparable to that of the
well-established women’s fashion magazine category (Shiau 2012). Historically, the development
of men’s fashion magazines follows a distinctive trajectory, which has been closely related to the
proliferation of symbols and practices celebrating subjectivities among the gay community in
the 1990s. Thus, the formation of Men’s UNO in Taiwan occurred in a broader cultural context
in which the nascent local men’s fashion discourse was nearly non-existent, being dominated by
women’s fashion and/or so-called “queer” magazines that sidestep the pink market and expand
their share of the local market. Desperately seeking another niche, global capitalists exploited
the notion of “metrosexuality,” a Western import, which carefully assuages and manages anxieties
related to the threat of the feminization and homosexualization of men posed by commercial
masculinity through foregrounding and organizing homosociality in strategic ways (Shugart
2008). Since the introduction of GQ and the Western notion of metrosexuality, in a sense, the
men’s fashion scene has become indebted to sportsmen for its very existence—a suggestion first
made by Coad (2008). David Beckham, the most widely recognized metrosexual icon, presents
a juxtaposition of two contradictory qualities: on the one hand, he excels in football and so