The Rise And Fall Of The First Lad Mag

In the 1990s and 2000s, one of the main sources of print glamour photography was in the pages of “lad mags” such as Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, which for a time were among the biggest-selling and most widely circulated magazines in the country.

All three had a major cultural impact and shaped a movement known as the “new lad”, and none of those three exist in print anymore, removing an avenue for glamour models to showcase themselves and potentially launch careers off the back of.

The origins of the lad mag were based on a vision to create a lifestyle magazine for young men, similar to Cosmopolitan for women, Teen Vogue for young women and GQ for men, but titles such as The Hit and Cosmo Man struggled to gain readership in the 1980s, leading to the belief that lifestyle mags simply do not sell to young men.

That changed in 1994 with the launch of Loaded by IPC Media. Whilst the lead directors believed it would be a flop and said as much to initial editor-in-chief James Brown, they greenlit it under the auspices that its two primary subject bases (football and music) were already covered by other magazines.

The template Loaded established with the lad mag was to set it apart from the fashion lifestyle magazines seen in America such as GQ, by not creating an aspiration for its readership to be but instead focusing on sport, music, women and drugs, inspired greatly by the styles of Britpop icons such as Oasis.

James Brown left in 1997 to become editor of GQ, and after that Loaded would increase the glamour models in the pages, largely to compete with Nuts and Zoo in the early 2000s.

 This increased circulation considerably, but once lad mags were treated as a top-shelf magazine, circulation figures dropped, and despite several changes in ownership and an attempted relaunch in 2015, Loaded printed its final issue in 2015.