Lads' mags

What it means

Lads’ mags were a genre of British men’s lifestyle magazine that flourished from roughly 1994 to 2015, occupying the previously uncharted territory between a proper top-shelf publication and a copy of GQ. Titles like Loaded, FHM, Nuts, and Zoo combined photos of women in swimwear and lingerie with articles about football, gadgets, beer, music, and the sort of humour that your English teacher would not have described as enriching. They were, in the politest possible terms, not entirely wholesome, but they were never quite smut either. That ambiguity was the whole point, and it was also the thing that eventually killed them.

The lads’ mag sat on the middle shelf. This is not a metaphor. While jazz mags lived behind the counter or on the top shelf in an opaque wrapper, lads’ mags occupied prime real estate at eye level in WHSmith, which meant you could buy one alongside a Twix and a bottle of Lucozade without the newsagent raising so much as an eyebrow. The transaction felt respectable, or at least not criminal. That accessibility was their genius.

Where it came from

The genre was born when Loaded launched in 1994 with the tagline “For men who should know better.” This was not an accident of phrasing. The entire proposition was a wink: we all know why you are picking this up, and we have wrapped it in enough articles about Oasis and the Premier League that you can pretend otherwise. FHM, Maxim, and later the cheaper weeklies Nuts and Zoo followed the same formula. By the early 2000s, FHM alone was shifting over 600,000 copies a month, which suggests that a not insignificant portion of British men were deeply interested in “the gadget reviews.”

“I only read it for the articles.” “Mate, there are six articles and forty-seven photos of Kelly Brook.” “Yeah, and I read all six.”

Culturally, lads’ mags were the print wing of something called New Lad culture, a cheerful reaction to the earnest, moisturiser-buying New Man of the late 1980s. Where the New Man was supposed to have feelings, the New Lad was supposed to have a pint. The magazines gave this attitude a publishing empire, a few hundred thousand subscription revenues, and approximately one decade before the internet rendered them completely redundant.

How it is used

The term “lads’ mags” now functions less as a description and more as a period marker, like “Ceefax” or “dial-up.” It places you squarely in an era when discovering something a bit after the watershed required leaving the house and making eye contact with another human being, which, for a generation that now has a smartphone, sounds not unlike a nature documentary about a dying ritual.

“Remember lads’ mags? You had to physically go to a shop and stand in a queue holding one.” “Absolutely barbaric. I can’t believe we survived as a species.”

It is worth noting that lads’ mags also had a rather dramatic final act. In their last years, several supermarkets demanded they be sold in “modesty bags,” opaque plastic wrappers that made purchasing one feel approximately as discreet as buying a firework in a library. This pleased absolutely nobody: campaigners thought it did not go far enough, readers thought it went too far, and the magazines themselves could not help but notice that covering up your own front page is not a brilliant sales strategy. Nuts and Zoo folded in 2014 and 2015. FHM and Loaded limped online, then went quiet. The era was, to use the appropriate level of understatement, over.

See also

If lads’ mags occupied the middle ground, their neighbours are worth a visit. Jazz mags covers the properly top-shelf publications that lads’ mags spent their entire existence pretending not to be, while top-shelf explains the newsagent geography that made the distinction matter. For the full dictionary, we have rather more where this came from.