Have lad mags finally grown up? The Londoner was surprised to see that the relaunched cover of Loaded doesn’t contain a scrap of female nudity on the cover. Have they really decided to ditch the babes?
“Yes — we’re going to be far more discerning and sophisticated from now on,” says a spokesman at Simian Publishing, which took over Loaded late last year.
And sophisticated it is. There’s one woman in the issue, actress Olympia Valance. “She’s beautiful but she’s fully clothed and it’s a Q&A,” says the spokesman. “We’re going for substance. We’ve hired the feminist writer Julie Burchill as a columnist. We’re thinking of having a gay column too.”
In fact, the only bit of naked flesh is Ricky Hatton in his shorts — the boxer has been hired as a new columnist.
Loaded changed hands after sales figures fell deeper than Katie Price’s cleavage — in 2011 its circulation was less than a 10th of the 350,000 a decade earlier. “When the magazine launched in 1994 it was very much of its time but it had got to the point where it was just lowering the tone. We’re not going to have any more lewd content,” says its spokesman, adding that the campaign to put lad mags on the top shelf “wasn’t commercially viable for us” but “mostly the change in content has come from our readers saying we’d lost touch with them”.
“Hurrah!” says No More Page 3 campaigner Lucy-Anne Holmes when we tell her the news. “The people who work at Loaded realise women wear clothes! And do stuff!” Viva la revolución.
