Meanings
- rareuncountableLadettish behaviour; the condition or characteristics of a ladette.
Her look for the single was a feminine reclaiming of sleaze and camp, an unfashionable identity in the 90s which differed from that of Riot Grrl, from “ladettism” and from the heroin-chic look of Kate Moss.
2017 February, Rhian E. Jones, Daniel Lukes, Larissa Wodtke, Triptych: An Examination of the Manic Street Preachers Holy Bible, Watkins Media, page 783 more examples
Ladettism was postfeminist in that it was predicated on assertions about female power constructed through rhetoric, practices and imagery that affirmed the self-determination, supremacy, and cultural dominance attributed “masculine” subject positions and male-oriented cultural forms.
2011 March, Diane Negra, Su Holmes, editors, In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 304Subtly but significantly different from ladettism, whose template was a doeeyed and football-shirted take on the gamine rather than the glamour girl’s campy excess and abundance, Kenickie’s was not an identity which sat comfortably within Britpop.
2013 March, Rhian E. Jones, Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender, Collective Ink, page 39A friend of mine — we'll call her Bridget — lived the other ‘90s Third Wave feminist cliché: ‘ladettism’. A wholly British phenomenon, ladettism had unlikely roots in a macho, working-class subculture.
2020 March, Sally Howard, The Home Stretch: Why the Gender Revolution Stalled at the Kitchen Sink, Atlantic Books, page 53
Origin
Cite this entry
ladettism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ladettism
“ladettism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ladettism. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “ladettism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/ladettism.
Source: ladettism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.