LESBIAN kisses, hairy armpits, the gentle roll of a soft belly: in 2016, none of these images is unprecedented on our screens. Girl-on-girl smooching is almost too ordinary to mention; everyone from Madonna to Julia Roberts has shown us their oxter fluff, and images of well-padded bodies are much more commonplace than they once were.

Even so, throw them together with a girl sitting legs akimbo on the Tube and a glamorous young woman picking her teeth, and you have the perfect montage with which to bait the conservative press.

The new autumn/winter commercial by clothing giant H&M has got rightwing commentators hot and bothered because it claims to want to recast the terms “lady” and “ladylike”. The ad is mischievously set to a remake of Tom Jones’s paean to chauvinism, She’s A Lady (quote: She’s the kind I like to flaunt and to take to dinner/But she always knows her place) and opens with a voluptuous model padding to the bathroom mirror in her undies, her folds of flesh softly framed. It then cuts to a series of other images of women: a shaven-headed beauty; a ripped Thai boxer; a 72-year-old Lauren Hutton in a classy business suit looking bored with her male companions; a woman eating chips on her bed and then reclining to show her unshaven armpits; and singer Jillian Hervey picking her teeth with a fork. These are women being unafraid and non-conformist. These are women being unladylike.

It’s not offensive; it’s not even particularly edgy. Hell, everyone shown has been in hair and make-up for hours, and there are no crooked teeth, bad skin shots or big noses – now that really would be groundbreaking. But the advert has upset the usual suspects anyhow. “Do these pictures REALLY sum up what it means to be a lady?” asked an indignant Daily Mail, getting all sniffy at H&M for suggesting the term "ladylike" is “old and outdated”. Then columnist Sarah Vine weighed in, attacking the advert for exalting those who defy convention (God forbid) and complaining that most women “don’t spend their time rolling round on hotel beds showing off their underarm hair”.

Vine is right about one thing: it is a bit contrived. It’s a fashion advert, after all. It’s designed to shift frocks, and thanks in part to the Daily Mail, it's no doubt doing so. There’s been an excitable reaction on social media and the ad has been viewed more than two million times.

But to give it its due, this short commercial has also raised an interesting question: exactly what does it mean these days to be "ladylike"? The term was once deemed a compliment, but to many women today, it no longer feels like it.

H&M claim to want to redefine "ladylike" to mean “bad-ass, independent, free-willed, entertaining, opinionated and offbeat” – pretty much the opposite, in other words, of what it has traditionally meant.

Can that really be done? Can you actually recast the meaning of words that no longer fit the zeitgeist? Possibly – the gay community managed to re-appropriate “queer”, after all.

But it seems doubtful whether many women want to reclaim "ladylike". The term has too much baggage attached: hat boxes overflowing with class connotations and dainty valises packed with prescriptive rules of behaviour. Better, surely, that the word "ladylike" falls slowly into obsolescence and our notion of womanliness and femininity broaden to take its place.

What did being a lady, and ladylike, traditionally mean? In the early middle ages, "lady" referred to the female head of a household, a term that soon expanded to mean a woman who ruled over subjects as well as servants. Later, it became the female analogue of "gentleman", and was used more casually as a polite term applied to all women above a certain, rather loosely defined, social standing.

So "lady" in popular understanding has been tied up with notions of class from the very beginning.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "ladylike" involves “having the distinctive manner and appearance of a lady”. It implies refinement, decorum and abiding by socially acceptable modes of feminine behaviour (including, by implication, sexual behaviour).

The class-conscious Victorians and Edwardians certainly knew a lady when they saw one – and apparently my grandmother did not fit the bill. She was born in 1904 and told my mother the story of how, aged 12, she travelled solo by train Bradford to Darlington. To amuse herself, she started whistling, only to be interrupted by a man sitting in her carriage. He told her disapprovingly that “a whistling woman and a crowing hen, wake even the devil out of his den”. The message was clear: females whistling are unnatural and unladylike. (She can’t have taken it much to heart because my grandmother carried on whistling throughout her life.)

What a terrible bore it must have been to be a lady, no matter how respectable it made you. Being ladylike was – still is – about adhering to certain approved modes of female behaviour, which really means being kept in your place. Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion became a lady by learning how to pronounce her vowels and curb her free and colourful opinions.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis: surely she is the epitome of the late 20th-century lady. The First Lady's rigidly maintained public persona was of a demure, softly spoken 1960s wife of impeccable appearance who maintained a sweet smile through all of her husband’s infidelities. To quote Tom Jones again: “Well, she knows what I'm about/She can take what I dish out, and that's not easy.” Poor Jackie.

Effectively, she seems to have lived inside a social straitjacket and it’s easy to see why, 50 years on, the term "ladylike" is not so well-received any more, especially by young women.

My 19-year-old niece, Anna Hazelwood, a politics student, would define ladylike as “an etiquette thing”. To her, it’s about “never speaking out of line, wearing knee-length skirts, drinking out of china cups; a lady to me would be a sort of giggling, wet girl”. Anna would not like to be called ladylike; coming from a man, the term sounds patronising to her ears, like a “lesser form of femininity”. “A woman is earthy and true to life; a lady is confined. She’s all about appearance.” If she heard someone describe the Duchess of Cambridge as a lady, she would defend her, on the basis, as Anna sees it, that it must be hard being a royal. In other words, she would assume the remark was an insult.

Obviously, some uses of the term that are less controversial, such as when it is used as a suffix in “dinner ladies”. Many consider it respectful to refer to an older female as a “lovely lady” as opposed to a lovely woman. Fair enough.

But even in this context, there are pitfalls. Anyone referring to a “lady doctor” or “lady engineer” – once perfectly acceptable terms – would today be seen as patronising and old-fashioned. And some men, even younger men, still ingratiatingly address women as “ladies”, imagining they are being flattering or respectful. In fact, it often makes these unfortunate males sound like fogeys or sleazebags.

The whole concept of the lady is viewed by many today with amusement, not least David Walliams and Matt Lucas in BBC’s Little Britain. In the "bad transvestite" sketch, hulking six-footer Walliams dresses as a sort of grotesque Edwardian lady with high frilly collars and absurd eye shadow, insisting in a screeching falsetto that “I’m a lady!” to anyone he meets. At the end of each sketch, he is always forced to admit, in a gravelly bass, to his real gender.

Ridicule, disparagement, irrelevance: with women’s growing empowerment, ladylike hankerings are simply not taken seriously in mainstream pop culture.

It’s true that “lady” (as opposed to ladylike) has been rather brilliantly recast in a sassy, sisterly, ironic way by artists such as Lady Gaga and Beyonce.

But the term’s original associations are still potent and hard to overcome. Karen Boyle, professor of feminist media studies at Stirling University, is not convinced that, in a British context, "lady" and "ladylike" can, or should, be redefined and given a new lease of life.

“For reclamation of a term to be effective, it needs to have political salience – and I wouldn’t particularly want to reclaim 'lady', or 'gentleman',” she says.

As she points out, the term "lady" is tied up not only with gender and class politics, but also with racial discrimination. “In a British context, I would associate a lady as being upper middle-class, which historically meant white," says Boyle, though this notion is subverted by the ethnically diverse cast of H&M’s ad campaign.

It is a term that seeks to denote exclusivity: “Only certain women ever had access to being ladylike – servants didn’t, for instance. Lots of women didn’t. Even contemporary notions of ladylike behaviour require you to have access to resources.”

And the problem is that you cannot unmake those powerful, established associations to replace them with new ones, unless everyone is on board with the project.

And not everyone is. If 50 years of modern feminism have proven one thing, it is that traditional gender stereotypes die hard. There are still women who aspire to be ladylike. The longest-running weekly women’s magazine in England is none other than The Lady, which carries the strapline “for elegant women with elegant minds”. In the second decade of the 21st century, that publication is still determinedly upper middle-class in tone and still the go-to place for readers seeking to recruit domestic servants. Perhaps this tells us something important: that those who still regard being a lady as a compliment see it as a reflection of their social standing.

The Lady’s former editor, Rachel Johnson, fronted a documentary examining the role of the lady in modern society, which concluded that ladylike behaviour had become desirable again to some women. She pointed to the popularity of etiquette classes, which include advice on how to exit cars in a ladylike fashion, and found that there were women who still want to learn how to ride side-saddle.

Karen Boyle suspects there are probably many women who want to keep such traditional notions of "ladylike" manners alive in order to associate themselves with the term's old class, racial and social distinctions – and that is one reason why we are likely still to be using it in 30 years time. (There's also the fact that, quite honestly, there is no comfortable alternative to the address: “Ladies and gentlemen ... ”)

For younger women, perhaps unaware of the term's historical associations, being a lady might well seem superficially appealing. The ladylike aesthetic is a fashion staple that comes around every few seasons – demure hemlines, pastel box jackets and pearls.

Models play at being 1950s housewives and the punters lap it up because it is a change from the norm. For years, the dominant archetype of the young female in popular screen fiction has been the wisecracking toughie with a resourceful nature and a sideline in kick boxing. Think every Doctor Who assistant since Billie Piper; think Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and Natasha Romanoff in Captain America. It is inevitable that young women will tire of this new straitjacket and want to experiment with other norms of behaviour. To those girls, being ladylike might seem like fun, at least for a while.

And there will always be some females for whom demure, decorous behaviour is a natural fit, just as there will always be some men who like to think of themselves as true gentlemen because they “know how to treat a lady”. “Then the question becomes: what are the benefits that accrue from behaving in a femininely appropriate way?” asks Boyle. “Well, you can be relatively invisible, which can be a powerful thing.” After all, depressingly, being an opinionated, free-living female in 2016 is still almost guaranteed to make you a target of abuse. Sometimes, women find it less exhausting and stressful just to conform.

All in all, it seems unlikely that old-fashioned ideas of ladylike behaviour will die out quickly. But it also seems unlikely they will ever again be mainstream. Being ladylike looks set to become increasingly irrelevant to the majority. For most women, the concept will probably live on as a bit of a joke with an unpleasant edge, one that clashes with their growing aspiration to live outside the pretty little box that once imprisoned their gender.