The '90s Lad Is Making a Comeback. That’s Bad for Men’s Mental Health
When I began working in men’s magazines in the early 1990s, lad culture was so dominant, so coherent, so everywhere, it was as if the editors, TV presenters, footballers and musicians all met up in the pub (it would have to have been the pub) and agreed to spread the word. The '90s lad was cocky, frequently off his head, successful without trying and always up for a laugh. But he wasn’t built for longevity. He was out for a good time, not a long time.
Fast-forward to 2025 and Oasis are reforming, Loaded magazine has been revived, Soccer AM lives again in podcast form and Danny Dyer is set to revisit The Football Factory with a spin-off called Marching Powder. Everywhere you look, there are hints of a growing nostalgia about that period and about the kind of men who dominated three decades ago. It isn’t too difficult to see why. The '90s were perhaps the last time Britain felt like an optimistic place to be and nostalgia is a particularly powerful drug. A study into the benefits of looking back fondly found that it can both boost self-esteem and build social ties. But before we all dust off our parkas and start going mad for it with abandon, let’s not forget what being a lad really meant for men’s health.
‘The legacy is really strong,’ says Ben Hine, professor of applied psychology at the University of West London. ‘Because of the general excess of the time, it exploded.’
Acceptable in the '90s
If you had to put a date on it, 1994 feels like the moment ‘lad’ really came into being. It was the year Loaded magazine launched, the year Oasis released Cigarettes And Alcohol, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner began Fantasy Football League and Sky started Soccer AM. It was not long after I’d joined men’s glossy FHM.
At the time, the world was full of men turning their backs on the intensity of Kurt Cobain and grunge, and relaxing into a pubby, very British, silly and ironic mood. The scandal-ridden Tory government was on the cusp of being replaced by modern and hopeful New Labour and FHM had moved from the executive lounge of an international airport to the sofa of a flatshare where all the residents were attempting to make jokes pretty much all of the time.
The choice to embrace a druggy, drunk and goofy version of manhood was partly an unconscious response to the confidence women were finding. Thelma And Louise was released in 1991, the Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement made a mark in the early stages of the decade and a few years later, in 1996, the Spice Girls emerged with Girl Power. There was no equivalent for men and so the lad persona may well have been an attempt to turn back the clock to a blurry, distorted memory of our 70s dads. This was also a period of strong economic growth and low inflation, so a sense of prosperity and pleasure-seeking was also in the air for many.
In the offices of FHM, when we wrote about lads, we wrote about the behaviour of famous people who drank a lot, took drugs and broke the rules. The antics of men such as George Best, Hunter S Thompson and Oliver Reed fascinated us, and they joined Mexican drug lords and East End gangsters to form a cast of characters who seemed to sprint through life without a care. But, and this seems extraordinary looking back, there was virtually no discussion about the mental fitness of these men. Nowadays, everyone from rugby players to former special forces soldiers and even Vinnie Jones talks openly about mental health. But back then, we never stopped to wonder if the ‘crazy’ displayed by the celebrities we covered was literally a product of mental distress.
‘Those people had deep issues,’ says Professor Hine. ‘My dad talked about George Best all the time. George Best wasn’t just “a legend”, he was clearly very mentally ill. You end up being attracted to the people who fulfil the role you’re being told you should fulfil. I grew up in the '90s, and I knew I was supposed to be this closed-off, excessive, no-emotions character.’
A Design For Life
Looking back, the unintended effect of FHM, Loaded and a whole raft of TV presenters, filmmakers and musicians all tuning into that moment was to create a single, hugely dominant version of what it was to be a man. And that man had some very distinctive properties. He lived life to excess; there was a sense that rock-star hedonism was achievable and it was a time when Liam and Noel Gallagher were telling us all we needed were cigarettes and alcohol and we were going to live forever.
The '90s man also had to be comfortable with casual sex and sexual imagery. By that point, Page Three of The Sun had already acquired a stale, betting-shop seediness, but videos such as Blur’s Country House, which was released in 1995 and featured models framed within a Benny Hill pastiche, confirmed sexual imagery’s new fashionable status. The '90s lad culture coated sexualised images of women in a protective layer of irony that allowed them to become mainstream.
More than anything else, '90s man had to be funny – often to a fault. The quality we valued more than any other was a refusal to take anything seriously, ever. The decade gave us men who seemed able to undercut any crisis with a perfectly pitched one-liner. Jeremy Clarkson, along with Chris Evans, Frank Skinner, Danny Baker and others, were always off-the-cuff funny in a way many wanted to emulate.
But emulating '90s man came at a cost. Like me, broadcaster and writer Sam Delaney also worked in lads’ mags. His book Sort Your Head Out is about being both a football-loving lad and someone with profound mental health challenges. Looking back, he can see how one contributed to the other: ‘It seemed like a good design for life, but if you never stopped to think about what caused you pain or hurt, you never understood how to manage your emotional responses.’
Steve James, meanwhile, runs The Cornermen, a men’s mental health and suicide-prevention service connected to a boxing club. ‘I was 16 in the mid-1990s, and I was just getting into girls and underage drinking. I was pretty unhealthy – booze, drugs. It was very seductive and, I can’t lie, fun when you’re 16.’
As a mental health professional, James sees the consequences of attempting to turn a youthful moment like lad culture into a permanent lifestyle. ‘A lot of the men I work with love getting on it at the weekend – taking coke; also, ketamine is massive now. If you keep that going, there is no meaning or purpose in that – it’s not sustainable.’
Some of James’ clients are men in their fifties and sixties who regret never having had a family. He says the dream of endless casual sex also turned out to be a false one. ‘People think you can get away with sex without emotion, but I’m not sure it’s that possible. I think sex is a very personal and emotional thing. That was part of the 1990s – sex goes with rock ’n’ roll.’
Obviously, the culture of the 1990s also had profound negative effects on women, too. Columnist and TV presenter Mariella Frostrup was the FHM cover girl on the November 1994 issue (we spoke briefly at the time). Thirty years later, I asked her how it felt to be a woman participating in that world. ‘This was supposed to be another wave of feminism, where you could drink and swear like men, but we were only allowed to go so far. Then it was, “Show us your tits and have a laugh, and if you don’t want to show us your tits, then you’re a humourless old harridan.”’
She says the culture of sexualising women was so dominant she felt she had little choice as a TV personality but to go along with the process. ‘I was 30 years old forging what was a pretty decent career doing what I felt was pretty intelligent work, but for me to be successfulI had to at least dally in that world. The 1990s was all about women being sexy and guys being dickish.’
The Evolution of Lad
The father of the lad, or at the very least the father of lads’ mags, is undoubtedly James Brown. He invented Loaded and is the author of Animal House, a memoir charting the period and his own experiences with drugs and alcohol. Today, the 59-year-old lives a clean and sober life. He can see why men were fascinated by and drawn to extreme figures from the '90s, and he can also see why many have had to turn away from that lifestyle, too.
‘They didn’t care about the consensus on what was acceptable British behaviour,’ he says. ‘When you saw George Best flaunting the lifestyle he had, it was exciting. Young guys looking up to hell-raisersis understandable.’ For Brown, it was the long-term implications that convinced him to turn back from his own excesses. ‘When I realised I probably needed to change my lifestyle, not drink and use drugs any more, what became apparent to me was all these stories we ran at Loaded were about people who’d invariably died or fucked up their careers.’
Eventually, I left FHM to work for a new men’s magazine coming to the UK from America. They offered a decent pay rise and an important-sounding job title, and I started despite my doubts: their approach struck me as completely out of touch with the immoderacy of the moment. That magazine was Men’s Health.
It felt like it had come from another solar system (actually, the town of Emmaus in eastern Pennsylvania, originally). In the beginning, this magazine also contained writing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in FHM, but at the same time it shared plenty of advice for men who wanted to look and – more importantly – feel better. I believe that we were unconsciously trying to take some of the lad culture of the UK and incorporate a self-improving version of manliness that had been inherited from the longer running Men’s Health US, but looking back, there was still a hard, competitive edge to the men we wrote about. It’s a much kinder, more rounded human being targeted now as the magazine has evolved.
Today, latest figures show that 65 per cent of men in the UK are physically active, the Movember movement has over 6 million global supporters, there are nearly 5,000 gyms in the UK and 85 per cent of pubs offer at least one alcohol-free beer. Beyond the figures, the conversation around both mental and physical health has been transformed. The rise of men such as Joe Wicks and former Love Island contestant Dr Alex George gives men access to an entirely different set of role models.
Despite all this change, that retro man still winks at us, tempting us with an uncomplicated take on life, one where our emotional needs are replaced with laughs and beer. Many of those original lads now have children, responsibilities and fitness regimes of their own. I can easily see how, from a distance of 30 years, younger men can look back fondly at the swagger and confidence of '90s icons – alphas in today’s parlance. It looks like a time before anxiety existed, but appearances can be deeply deceptive. To yearn for the apparent simplicity of that period is entirely understandable, but trust someone who was there when we built the '90s lad – don’t, whatever you do, take him too seriously.
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