So you could criticize Men's Style on the grounds of that emoji story (whose premise, one of its own sources put it, "reeks of an old-fashioned and hetero-normative view of the world"); or of its title's implicit suggestion that "Style" is, as a default, a lady thing; or of its overall assumption that style, as a general proposition, is something that can be bought and sold. But here's one reason to love the section: It also carries the default assumption that fashion itself is becoming, quickly, a relatively egalitarian proposition. "The Menaissance," if you will, is upon us.

"Men are spending more on apparel and footwear than ever before," the market research firm Euromonitor International reports—so much so that, globally, menswear is expected to reach $40 billion in sales by 2019. Matters of style—which encompass not just clothing, but also grooming and etiquette and that ephemeral thing we tend of group under the umbrella of "charm"—are quickly becoming more of an equal-opportunity affair.

For the Times, this represents, for one thing, a great business opportunity. "The men's market is very hot right now," Brendan Monaghan, the paper's vice president of luxury, told The Cut. “Last year, we saw a 30-percent increase in men’s related ads in the newspaper, T, and digital combined. The demand for this is huge.”

Added to that is the fact that men, as readers, seem to be just as interested in style stories as women are. More so, even. "Styles has the image of [having] a female readership," Stuart Emmrich, the paper's Style editor, told me. "But, in fact, studies"—the Times' internal readership surveys—"have shown that it's heavily male." The paper, however, has had difficulty capitalizing on that insight. "We knew when we did stories in Styles on men's fashion and grooming, they did quite well, either on Most Emailed or Most-Viewed," Emmrich says. "But we weren't actually attracting the kinds of advertising we thought we would."

A standalone men's section, which has been in the works for about a year, is meant to answer that: to create a dedicated space where (mostly luxury) advertisers like Polo Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Macy's, and Bergdorf Goodman can tout their wares alongside male-focused fashion content. (Men's Style was initially conceived as a 12-to-14-page insert; due to "overwhelming advertiser interest," however, the section ended up with a hefty 32 pages.)

So on the one hand, yes, Men's Style represents a classic journalistic proposition: stories as the covalent bonds between advertisers and consumers. (As Simone Oliver, the Times' growth strategy editor for Lifestyle News, explained it: "The Times’s fashion and style audience is almost evenly split between men and women, so the goal is very much about getting the word out that Styles now has this robust offering of men’s content, building readers’ expectations and habits, and then keeping them hooked.")