Fags, Slags, and Ladettes: Classed Femininity in the Art of Sarah Lucas

Words: Jennifer Jasmine White

Make it stand out

In 1993, so the much-told story goes, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin set up The Shop. In a former dental surgery in Bethnal Green, the two artists sold ashtrays covered with Damien Hirst’s face and t-shirts with ‘HAVE YOU WANKED OVER ME YET’ printed in bold black. The stint was funded by the infamous Charles Saatchi, and, depending on your perspective, came to represent the beginnings of either a democratised and playful British new wave, or a cynical commercialisation of working-class culture.

These debates trundle on, but faced with photographs of the two women from the day they signed the lease, pint glasses in hand, a jukebox in the background and grins unapologetically full, one thing is certain. A newly lucrative model for working-class femininity was emerging in Britain, and it would partly be performed against the backdrop of the art world.

The Young British Artists (YBAs) were celebrated for their audacity and unapologetic canniness, but it was Lucas that would become most associated with one trope in particular: the ladette. Recent interests in blokecore and the appropriation of terrace culture bear traces of ladette-ism, but the origins of the mode were a far cry from Bella Hadid’s football shirts.  Brash, relaxed, and up for a laugh, young British women were proudly displaying traits that had long been part of the fabric of working-class femininity. Sara Cox rode a bronco on The Girlie Show. Denise Van Outen stole an ashtray from Buckingham Palace. Suddenly, downing a pint or smoking a fag was something worth paying attention to. 
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Just across town, Sarah Lucas was exposing the misogyny of the tabloid press via the gallery wall (Sod You Gits, 1991), and modelling the minimalist female form from the stuff of a post-pub takeaway (Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992). This contemporaneity was no coincidence, and Lucas would, whether she liked it or not, come to be seen as the old master of the ladette moment. 

This was a perception fuelled by Lucas’ own ‘look’, something she played with consciously in a series of self-portraits taken throughout the nineties. In them, the artist smokes, sips, and spreads her legs, gazing down the lens, challenging us to judge. Some discernment is perhaps warranted: to reclaim ladette culture as wholly liberatory would be short-sighted. The rendering of gender identity that ladette culture relied on is simplistic, and its preferred model of womanhood is no doubt defined along narrow physical lines. The ladettes Britons knew and briefly loved were almost without exception white, cis-gendered, and thin. Much like the glossy freedoms of Spice Girls feminism, this was an articulation highly susceptible to, and often complicit in, an exploitative commercial gaze. That possibility for exploitation was no doubt observed in the fate of the ladette herself, ultimately cast as the preferred fag-smoking bogeyman of both the conservative press and a newly ‘aspirational’ Labour party. 

“Lucas would, whether she liked it or not, come to be seen as the old master of the ladette moment.”

Lucas seemed keenly aware of the contradictions inherent to the ladette model, and her work allows us to glimpse both its potential liberatory energies and its prime candidacy for subsumption by the hyper-commercial. In the case of the latter, we might consider how Lucas’ preference for ‘stripped back’ or ‘slimmed down’ aesthetics and techniques was reflected back onto, and often advertised by, her own slim, mobile body. Works like Self-Portrait with a Mug of Tea (1993) or Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996) are still regularly used as symbolic adverts for the whole of her artistic output. 

These images offer gallery promoters an easily legible brand: cool, casual, and sexually available. To the right viewer, they represent much more, but they also offer up an example of how working-class femininity can become contained and commodified, expressed exclusively within the marketable bodily bounds of slimness and sexiness. 

Yet the working-class woman historically exceeds. So often, she is cast as ‘too much’, dangerously reproductive, difficult to contain. Much of her radical strength rests in this so-called excess, from fake-lashes to mouthy political articulations. As Lucas’ career has progressed, it is this that has been brought to the fore of her work. 

Lucas’ more recent soft, sculptural works engage with a much longer history of the working-class woman’s body and its representations. From worryingly reproductive wives, to ageing prostitutes, to Viz’s ‘fat slags’, pieces like Pauline Bunny (1997) and Fat Doris (2022) seem less occupied with the body of the artist, and more with those of the working-class women in the shadows: lumpy and disruptive, tired and defiant. “It turns out,” Lucas has recently written, “that a saggy tit is very expressive.”

The saggy tit upsets the gaze of the market, and perhaps that of the cultured gallery goer too. In this it is a useful tool, one utilised in a sculpture titled SLAG, from 2023’s Happy Gas. Surrounded by malleable forms made of nylon tights, SLAG is set apart by its weighty presence. But for the silvery stripper shoes grounding it, the work is cast entirely in concrete. Sex-work and masculine industry are brought into collision, as the woman’s body is cast both on and of the ‘slag heap’, a reputational metaphor and a geographical waste-product that bears much resemblance to the materials used. 

In contrast to Lucas’ earlier portraits, the existence of desires within this figure remain illegible. The working-class woman is weighed down by the signs her body provides, appearing ready-made and immovable, yet permanently held at a distance. SLAG is by no means immune from subsumption or co-option, (in fact, Happy Gas was fascinatingly sponsored by Burberry), yet this emphasis on illegibility offers useful resistance. The work prompts us to ask: is the working-class woman forever hardened and impenetrable, or do we simply lack the language needed to articulate her complexities and understand her desires? In these later works, Lucas gestures to the weight of an industrial past, the forces of stereotype, and the internal lives of working women generations previous, their own desires fated to be frozen invisible, their forms fixed. 

Haunted by the figure of the ladette and others that went before it, Lucas’ art offers up working-class femininity as multiple, whilst stressing the partiality of the available templates. Thirty years after her stint in The Shop, she places the working-class, hyper-sexualised woman at the centre of Tate Britain, in full critical view. Smuggled into the gallery in the guise of some unassuming saggy tits, her presence, and the interrogation of her desires, is more radical than ever. Lucas reminds us of our cultural difficulty in reading such bodies, but demands we look longer still.