Are lads mags back?
A new magazine, on sale today, has prompted this question.
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A new magazine! For boys!!
It’s called Sir! and it is, apparently, for men who embrace non-toxic masculinity. It’s the brainchild of Elgar Johnson, an editor who’s worked on titles like iD and GQ, and who already runs an indie biannual mag CircleZeroEight, which “communicate[s] style and culture through the lens of sport”.
Masculinity – whatever that might mean to you – is a hot topic in 2025. We’ve all heard that it’s in crisis. We all watched Adolescence. I am not about to dissect what it means to be a man in 2025; that is a question I have no business answering. But Elgar Johnson is attempting to do that, and he’s doing it via the medium of a magazine.
But I find this new venture interesting because it brings me back to something I frequently find myself mulling over in the course of researching the podcast: why did never men love magazines like women did?
The men’s lifestyle magazine genre has included titles of both huge commercial success and enormous prestige. In the 60s and 70s in the US, titles like Esquire and Rolling Stone frequently competed with news magazines and papers for critical accolades and were regularly honoured for their pioneering journalism. That critical recognition was never as forthcoming for women’s mags.
Pulitzers are well and good, but they don’t sustain an entire commercial model. Enter the lads mag. In 1994, the birth of Loaded and the relaunch of FHM under Mike Soutar ushered in a new type of men’s magazine – irreverent, impertinent, brash.
The titles were both huge commercial successes for their respective publishers, and captured the zeitgeist of the time, coinciding with the rise of the Britpop movement that made stars of swaggering Everymen from across the country and socioeconomic spectrum.