Two slogans of the 1990s tell you all you need to know about the way men and women went their different ways in that puzzling decade. For women, it was L’Oréal’s “Because you’re worth it”. This means: well done, princess, for being a woman. Now go and spoil yourself. It was a perfect line for a generation of hard-working women desperate to be pampered and knowing that modern men had lost the will and perhaps the right to do the pampering, so it was off to the spa and the hairdresser instead. That line is so embedded in the language that it has been shortened to “you’re worth it” and is still going strong.

The slogan for men didn’t last as long but for a while it had enormous potency. It was the off-the-cuff line invented for the launch of Loaded magazine in 1994: “For men who should know better”. This, too, was perfect. You’ve got your head around the feminism thing. You know how to work at a relationship, cook pasta and clean the lavatory. But isn’t that all a bit dull, not to say exhausting? Here’s a better idea. Let’s sit around drinking beer, looking at nice girls and arguing about whether Jaffa cakes are better than HobNobs. Choose life.

The only thing the L’Oréal girls and the Loaded men had in common was that they wanted to look younger. But while the girls bought serums and did yoga, men turned back the hormonal clock and became lads: rascals, drinkers and loveable rogues with teenage enthusiasms for girls’ underwear, beer, football and junk food. Maturity went into reverse; age, class and education were erased under a layer of Liam Gallagher stubble and a Damon Albarn estuary accent. For a while, in the mid to late 1990s, it was like a reenactment of that Ionesco play in which everyone decides to turn into rhinoceroses.

At the height of laddism I interviewed Ed Needham, the editor of FHM, for the BBC World Service. My brief was to explain to the world what was happening to British manhood. FHM was the right place to start. It had become Blondie to Loaded’s Clash – it commercialised that punky energy, overlaid it with a marketing savviness and took its sales way past the biggest-selling women’s titles, towards the 800,000 mark.

Needham, a thoughtful young man in serious spectacles, explained it like this: FHM’s business plan was based on the prediction that men would give up the magazine once they hit their thirties and/or started settling down and making houses and babies. Only they didn’t. They kept on buying the magazine into their thirties and even forties and its sales, unlike the readers’ jawlines, kept on defying gravity.

In one of many brilliant ideas that the FHM team had, they created an advice page of “dads” (DIY dad, travel dad, car dad) to give tips to men who would never, ever grow into their fathers.

You can’t write about the golden era of laddism without talking about the magazines; but it was a far wider phenomenon. Music, television, art, literature and, of course, sport were infiltrated by men with choppy hairstyles and trainers: Britpop bands such as Supergrass, Dodgy and Oasis, TV shows such as Men Bevaing Badly, presenters such as Chris Evans, artists such as Damien Hirst, actors such as Keith Allen and Neil Morrissey, writers such as Nick Hornby and footballers such as Paul Gascoigne.

Most women and the grown-up male commentators couldn’t see beyond the puerile behaviour, the lager, the fart jokes and the birds. They didn’t get the immense creative energy that the lads injected into British popular culture. I remember one famous blazer-wearing television presenter berating me over dinner because I expressed a mild admiration for Evans. “He’s a complete amateur,” he said with a viciousness that you’d never expect from his suave on-screen persona. And I thought, how would you manage improvising a two-hour breakfast show every morning with nothing but your wits and a few loose script ideas?

“Skill!” – that was the lads’ favourite term of approbation. Evans had skill. The sub-editors at Loaded and Maxim had skill. So did the artists who took over the Royal Academy in 1997 for Sensation. And the überlad, Gascoigne, was the most skilful player of his generation, beautiful to watch when he was on song. And what’s more, these blokes could perform after a huge night out on the bevvies and kebabs. Skill!

This is beginning to sound like an elegy, and with good reason. Laddism is done with, over, buried. Ed Needham, having exported UK laddism to the States with FHM, Maxim and Rolling Stone, is back, saying that now he is the father of a two-year-old, the “have a good time, all the time” credo “now seems like a message from a different frequency”.

Loaded’s James Brown now edits a luxury concierge magazine and defines himself as a father first and foremost, because “that’s what men are there for”. His then production editor, Jason Barlow, became a spiky-haired motoring and fashion presenter and is now making a pilot for a series with Chris Evans’s former producer with the brief “from Laddism to Dadism”. It will probably feature Liam Gallagher, who now seems happier being photographed in the park with his children than biting a photographer outside a club.

Keith Allen wrote a book called Grow Up – a sign that he has – and his drinking mate Alex James became a farmer. As for Chris Evans, he is on Radio 2. His buddy Gazza? Well, it turned out that the skill was no match for the kebabs and bevvies.

Gascoigne is a professional casualty, one of surprisingly few from the lad era (Robbie Williams may have a claim to be another, especially if he has a new album out). But there is evidence that beyond the celebrities there is a deeper problem. The lads’ cureall habits of having a drink/a smoke/a laugh caused malaise within a generation already struggling to find a place in an academically and economically tough world. As long ago as 1999 the Samaritans blamed the lad culture for a rising suicide rate: its survey of 1,400 males aged between 13 and 19 found that 67 per cent of those with suicidal feelings said that they had nowhere to turn for emotional help. And when lads weren’t inflicting damage on themselves they were doing it to other people.

The purest expression of harmless posh laddism used to be the Gumball Rally, in which rich petrolheads raced across Europe scattering chickens and the peasantry in their wake. This year’s event was brought to a premature halt when an elderly couple died after allegedly being hit by a Porsche 911 in Macedonia. A story from a different frequency indeed.

The men’s magazine market isn’t dead but it has gone almost full circle. In the 1980s publishers despaired of finding a market for male readers that was neither a) specialist nor b) pornographic. Nick Logan proved that it could be done with the launch of Arena in 1986. Now it seems that it can’t be done without the silicone implant of near-pornographic lingerie shoots and covers. The one significant exception is the thriving Men’s Health, which plays the classic women’s magazine trick: make your readers feel anxious about their bodies and sex lives, then tell them that you have the secret of making them healthier and sexier. It helps that there is a powerful bunch of advertisers ready to tell them the same thing – and so a market for male cosmetics and treatments that once didn’t exist is now worth £1.5 billion.

I asked Richard Swaab, a planning guru with Britain’s biggest advertising agency, AMV/BBDO, if the lad still figured as a legitimate target. He surprised me by choosing to talk about class. To him, laddism was just another outbreak of a regular British phenomenon: the middle classes choosing to ape working-class culture. So an art-school Guardian reader (Damon Albarn) sang in a Cockney accent and put greyhounds on his album cover, a privately educated chef (Jamie Oliver) acted like a geezer on a market stall, and a Cambridge postgraduate (David Baddiel) went to the top of the charts with a football song. But in researching the habits and aspirations of the lads who came along after laddism, they found that the things those middle-class tastemakers romanticised just weren’t glamorous enough. Young men have turned instead to their more enduring inspiration: American teen culture – which today means rap, bling and gangsta machismo.

Ask a twenty or early thirtysomething woman what she thinks of lads and she may say, as a 30-year-old friend of mine did the other day, that there’s something sweet and old-fashioned about a lad. “Give me a lad over a chav or a gangsta any day,” she said. “But you don’t see many around.”

Laddism and faddism have more than a few letters in common. I wouldn’t go so far as Richard Swaab and say that it was “just a bit of froth – nothing fundamental changed in the way men behaved”. But it proved to be a fragile and peculiarly English flower. Only the magazines proved exportable – most notably with Maxim,a big seller in the States, and healthy franchises for FHMand Loadedin many other countries. Oasis, Blur and Robbie never cracked America, Jamie remains on cable, and you don’t see Italian and Swedish blokes at the dogs wearing Ben Sherman shirts.

Most of all, the lads who defined laddism are now queueing up to say that, after all, they do know better. And L’Oréal, by the way, has a hugely successful range of men’s cosmetics and moisturisers.

Lads’ icons, then and now

Sex object The lad’s choice was Jo Guest, a Derbyshire-born “glamour” model whose ubiquity in Loaded and FHM ensured her place in the pantheon of male fantasy. Today there are as many sex objects on the internet as there are stars in the sky, although Paris Hilton is, I’m told, still pretty popular online.

Music In the 1990s it was ruled by the Britpop mafia whose Don, depending on your proclivities, was either Blur or Oasis. Now, though... well, the turnover of great bands seems particularly fast. Arctic Monkeys, whose first album was an easy match of Definitely, Maybe, swept 2006 Britain crowd-surfing on a wave of internet adulation. Their second album is pretty good too, but the star has waned: we move on quicker nowadays. I think the Hours are going to do particularly well this summer thanks to their glorious manthem Ali In The Jungle, which they played at the reformed lad Damien Hirst’s Dorchester party the other week, sparking excitement even among the jaded arterati.

Magazines not only created The Lad, they fuelled him. Loaded, FHM and even more sensitive titles such as Esquire were hugely successful. Now Arena and Esquire are in dire straits, Loaded reads like an artefact, Men’s Health is Cosmo with testosterone and GQ, though selling well, reads like an extended advertisement. The best mags these days – Word, New York Magazine, Observer Sport Monthly and Private Eye – aren’t specifically pitched at men. If we have girlfriends we read Grazia.

Sporting hero For The Lad, it was Gazza, an irresistible combination of the mercurial and the self-destructive. If F1 weren’t so dull I’d say that Lewis Hamilton may one day be the man. But today even rival fans give respect to Thierry Henry. And he doesn’t drink a drop.

Drink Today’s postmetrosexual New Lad may be vaguely worried about his waistline but not enough to eschew the joys of lager, lager and lager. Change for change’s sake isn’t always best, after all.

Luke Leitch