Don’t believe the haters – the Nineties was a great time to be a woman

I’m flipping through the March 1996 issue of Loaded, the zeitgeist-defining magazine “for men who should know better”. Loaded summed up the roister-doistering Nineties British male, collectively known as “lads”. There’s professional rogue Sean Bean on the cover, surrounded by straplines ballyhooing a De Niro/Pacino poster and articles on Page 3 stunna Kathy Lloyd, The Fast Show, and Iggy Pop (“looks like someone’s old mum”).

And who’s this on page 34? Why it’s Katie Puckrik, “the TV girl with the come-to-bed thighs”.

There are five pages of comely (and blessedly fully clothed) photos of me, accompanied by a frisky interview in which I’m clearly playing to the cheap seats (sample pull quote: “I’d prefer five minutes of unbridled filth anytime, to nine hours of bump and grind”).

It’s BBC2’s upcoming documentary Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem (9pm Friday 22 November) that’s got me pondering my place in the Nineties Ladosphere, specifically because I’m one of the contributors who appears.

When Loaded first came on the scene, I was well established as “delightfully unbuttoned” TV presenter (as dubbed by Britain’s food minister, a fellow judge on a sausage-tasting panel which also included Vic Reeves and Marco Pierre-White), who recklessly tangled with pop culture’s heroes and villains on Nineties yoof telly staples The Word (Channel 4), The Sunday Show (BBC2) and Pyjama Party (ITV).

Loaded was the church bulletin of lad culture, the initially benign cosplay of working-class masculinity that shaped everything from clothes, music and movies to language and attitudes. As editor James Brown wrote in the May 1994 launch issue, “Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters.”

Loaded sat companionably in the Cool Britannia landscape of the mid-Nineties. The UK had finally scrubbed off its post-war dinge and was feeling pretty fruity about itself.

Britpop, the YBAs and New Labour signposted the country’s renewed self-esteem, and as an American, I recognised and appreciated the bumptious optimism. And as a woman, I wanted to get in on the fun. While creating my 1996 chat show Pyjama Party (quickly cribbed by Channel 4 with their…uh… homage The Girlie Show), I coined “ladette” as shorthand for my response to lad culture.

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Like most categories whose clarity crumbles under closer scrutiny – “yacht rock”, “porn”, “democracy” – “ladette” is a slippery bit of nomenclature. But broadly, I was linguistically staking a claim to territory dominated by the boys: the freedom to joyfully take up space in the world, to live large, to be a goofball, to overdo it.

The freedom to be smart, hilarious, annoying, sexual, opinionated, ridiculous, in any combination, at every volume. What was good for the gander was good for the goose, I reasoned, and I wasn’t the only one.

When the Spice Girls girl-powered their way onto the scene in June 1996 with “Wannabe”, young British women were already there to meet them en masse – at the pubs, on the terraces, in clubs, in bands, in print, on TV, on the big screen.

We were being the culture, and making the culture. Makers included All Saints, Caitlin Moran, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Davina McCall, Kate Moss, Lush, Kate Winslet, Helen Fielding, Sara Cox, Zoe Ball, Shampoo, Anna Friel, Tracy Emin: the roll call is smart, hilarious, annoying, sexual, opinionated, ridiculous – and dazzling.

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I was there, too. And in that moment, loaded and ladettes shared the same epiphany: that permission to be an idiot leads to the empowering confidence to celebrate all the colours of your rainbow.

And clothes were part of the rainbow, too. My own wardrobe was stuffed with slip dresses, mini kilts and over-the-knee socks, while streets and festivals were patrolled by an army of girls in baggy, low-slung Maharishi Snopants worn with baby T’s and combat boots.

It was the dawning of trainers with everything, which summed up the insouciant ease of youthful fashion before Love Island, Made in Chelsea and the Kardashians popularised the desperate dowager look underpinned by fake tans, bleached teeth and shapewear.

By the time the fin de siècle fin’d, the juice had drained from loaded’s cojones as the mag sagged across the Noughties and teens. The mood had darkened, and even pre-MeToo, whispers had begun circulating about the alleged behaviour of star fashion photographers. The innocence of the 1990s was in the rear-view mirror.

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Loaded’s last-ditch increase in naked ladies did not result in an increase in sales, and the monthly went from being ironically, gleefully louche, to ditching the irony and deflating the glee. It washed up a low-rent lovechild of Razzle and Viz, minus the gravitas of either. Currently Loaded limps on as a “digital lifestyle brand”.

Lad culture hasn’t aged too well, either, as the frolicsome Nineties era of cheeky satyrs-at-play with their towel-flicking bantz has curdled into today’s ugly “your body, my choice” bros, epitomised by sex addict-turned-Christianist Russell Brand and manosphere chud Andrew Tate.

And the blithesome irony that earlier wink-winked loaded’s gonzo gestures is now a grim get-out-of-jail-free card deployed by internet trolls jokewashing rape threats on X (“lol”).

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Satisfyingly, it’s the unjustly-mocked ladette who has kept her cool, especially with her 2024 rebranding as “brat”. Collins Dictionary declared Charlie XCX’s term its 2024 word of the year, defining it as “characterised by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude”.

As Charlie XCX explained what brat was in a TikTok video: “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.”

The results of this particular pop culture shakedown are in. Loaded is faded. Lad is bad. And Ladette is brat – which eminently preferable to being demure.

Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem airs on BBC2 at 9pm on 22 November