Whatever happened to the likely lads? Judging by recent events, they've grown up, settled down and chucked their collection of rude t-shirts and nudie mags.

Last week, it was announced that the UK print edition of lads' bible Maxim -- which in the '90s parlayed a beers, booze and bird formula into a global brand -- is to shuffle into the great newsagents rack in the sky after a steep decline in readership.

It's not alone. While progressive "metro-sexual" publications such as Men's Health and Monocle ride a circulation boom, brassier glossies such as FHM and Loaded are looking increasingly like relics of a bygone age. Lads' culture is, if not dead, then certainly suffering the mother of all hangovers.

How far we've come from the era when a belching, swaggering Liam Gallagher embodied rock and roll chic, kebab-chugging Paul Gascoigne was one of the world's acclaimed footballers and no self-respecting comedian would dare take the stage without a repertoire of knob-jokes in his back pocket.

Today, celebrity culture worships at the feet of mummy's boys such as Chris Martin whilst mainstream comics riff on the responsibilities of fatherhood and the joys of being domesticated. Can it really be the case that the unreconstructed male has been . . . well, reconstructed?

"Maxim appealed to a certain clique of guys," says Kirstie McDermott, of beauty and fashion blog Beaut.ie, "Most of whom are probably putting the X-Box away now and are settled down with kids."

She's right -- the decline in lad culture is, to an extent, generational. Yesterday's free-living 20-something is today a harried 35-year-old, weighed down by mortgage debt and the responsibility of feeding and clothing a young family. No wonder he's not really up for spending his evening ogling pictures of British glamour models in replica football strips. Also, isn't that what the internet's for ? After all, Maxim UK is to live on as a website (a sister publication in the US will continue as a print edition, on the back of healthy 2.5m sales).

"Weekly mags are continuing to do very well but what's happening to Maxim is a sign of the fragmentation of the media in the UK," says Dominic Ponsford, editor of Britain's Press Gazette. "For a publication such as that, there is no publication from digital television and broadband."

More generally, Maxim and its ilk were a product of their times -- times that are now emphatically over. Though hugely popular in Ireland there was and is something quintessentially British about those publications -- their wink 'n' nudge tone, ribald humour and acres of flesh were in the tradition of the saucy sea-side postcard and Benny Hill. Not by coincidence, the mid-'90s were also marking the boom years for Britpop, when nice middle class boys across the UK (and, often Ireland) donned the regulation "chav" uniform of zip-up tracksuit and over-sized white runners and took to shouting "oi!" down the disco.

This kind of bloke-ish exuberance hardly seems appropriate at a time when all but the most luddite of men have at least considered moisturising. Like it or not, we're all metrosexuals now.

"Grooming-wise, yeah, Irish men are out and proud, from what I can tell. When people -- men or women -- find out that I write about beauty for a living, they always tell me what they use, unprompted," says Kirstie McDermott."

Men will ask questions about what they should be doing for their skin and there's a definite sense of pride that they're taking care of themselves. And they're dead right -- men only have one skin, just like us gals, and keeping it in good nick is the way to go."

An interesting flip-side to the decline of ladmag culture has been the revival of 'old school' men's glossies such as GQ and Esquire.

Bastions of smoothie sophistication and gentlemanly insouciance, these publications have very clear ideas as to the sort of men we should aspire to be.

Where Maxim et al celebrated the lager-chugging, chicken burger-munching wild boy, GQ and its ilk concern themselves with instructing the reader in the correct way to mix a cocktail, and the sort of deck shoe you should wear to the yacht club this spring.

When American GQ's style columnist was asked by a reader whether he could get away with donning a tracksuit for work, the poor journalist almost expired.

Unless you're about to participate in a triathlon, he wrote, never, ever wear sports casuals. Show him the video to Blur's 'Parklife' and he'd probably run screaming from the room.

Esquire and GQ reflect a hankering in the wider culture for an older idea of male sophistication.

When Nestle was looking for a face for its Nespresso brand of machines it didn't pick an Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey -- it went for an old-school smoothie: George Clooney. Buttoned-down charm is what we want from our movie stars -- and perhaps expect from ourselves -- today.

"In this era of post- metrosexuality men do seem to be less interested in acts of rowdiness than their predecessors," says fashion writer Cillian O'Connor. "In terms of fashion/style men are now taking an active interest in what they wear as opposed to the situation in the past where the females in their lives selected their apparel."

We certainly don't have any tolerance for '90s-style bad boys who question a lady's virtue live on radio.

Just ask Jonathan Ross, who was lucky to escape with his job following "Sachsgate", in which he and comedian Russell Brand rang elderly actor Andrew Sachs and impugned the honour of his granddaughter. Tellingly, most of the booing and hissing was directed at the laddish Ross rather than Brand -- the uber-dandy appeared to have been forgiven largely on account of the fact that he had the air of a man who had read a lot of Oscar Wilde.

All of that said, it would be unwise to declare the lad-mag expired quite yet. Together Loaded and FHM still sell somewhere north of 100,000 copies whilst the more puerile and explicit weeklies Nuts and Zoo are also keeping their heads above water.

However, they clearly no longer reflect mainstream concepts of masculinity. Ours is a world in which it is (almost) acceptable to admit to using moisturiser or give a manly embrace in public. The lager- swilling every-lad is yesterday's news -- long live the touchy- feely New Man.