Kitty Drake always loved glossy magazines. She also hated the way they made her feel — the relentless dictation of what was normal, what was desirable, what a woman should be. In 2013, she and co-editor Sadhbh O'Sullivan launched a Kickstarter for Ladybeard, a feminist print magazine that would take the form and format of a mainstream women's glossy but gut the content and replace it with something that didn't make its readers despise themselves. The pilot was more zine than magazine, photocopied and handed out for free. But it was how the team came together — seven women in total: Drake, O'Sullivan, and Madeleine Dunnigan as co-editors, Hannah Abel-Hirsch and Tyro Heath as arts editors, Scarlet Evans and Bronya Meredith on design.
All of them worked on Ladybeard outside their actual jobs. Evans was a designer at Made Thought. O'Sullivan was a journalist. Nobody got paid. The first full issue, themed around sex, took two years to produce, ran to a substantial page count with seventy contributors, and arrived with a hot-pink vibrator on the cover. The team was unapologetic. "We wanted the magazine to force people to look sex in the face," they said. Inside were testimonies, illustrated editorials, an interview with the founders of Sh!, London's first women's sex shop, a feature on the drag troupe Denim, and voices from across the spectrum — transgender, asexual, ecosexual, HIV positive, queer — that mainstream women's magazines had never thought to include.
The editorial principle was deliberate absence. The editors acknowledged they were all young, white, and London-based, and made a conscious effort to ensure their own voices were not the dominant ones. "We don't want our magazine to be just for women," they explained. "We want it to be interesting and exciting for people of all genders, ages, and sexualities." Subsequent issues tackled the mind and beauty, each time opening up topics that mainstream media had either sentimentalized or ignored. Ladybeard was included in "Print! Tearing it Up," a London exhibition celebrating radical female-founded publications alongside Spare Rib, gal-dem, and Mushpit.
The magazine was never intended to be profitable — it was made by friends, for the pleasure of making something they believed in. That sincerity is what made it work. In a publishing landscape where feminism had become a marketing strategy, Ladybeard was the real thing: playful, political, printed on beautiful paper, and completely unwilling to tell its readers how to live.
Explore Ladybeard at <a href="https://ladybeardmagazine.co.uk/" target="\_blank">ladybeardmagazine.co.uk