Black models, foreign films, queer culture – how The Face shaped me as a young man

The Guardian

28-02-2025

I still remember the first copy of the Face magazine I bought at age 14. It was the January 1984 issue, with model and pop-rock singer Nick Kamen on the cover, in a ski cap. As a young kid, I bought magazines weekly, starting with Look-in, a preteen music and television magazine, followed by the brightly coloured teen bible Smash Hits and then the Face, the last two founded by Nick Logan. The Face was like a cool, older teenager who invited you into a sexy new world where fashion, music and design fused to create a revolutionary culture. As a young Black gay man, that invitation meant everything.
This truly was the heyday of magazines, as I was reminded when visiting The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery last week. I was moved to see all of the magazine covers and spreads that I had collected and hung up on the walls in my youth. There was a particular image of the Kiss FM crew in their studio with Norman Jay, Gordon Mac and Paul 'Trouble' Anderson, DJs whom I had loved and followed. When I was 16 and had left school, the Face opened a window into London's arts, music, clubbing, queer and fashion scene, which took me out of my small world in south London and allowed me to aspire to something different. Beyond the capital's walls, the magazine introduced me to the emerging house music scene in Chicago and New York, and foreign-language films.
The 1980s and 90s are often described as something of a 'monoculture', a period in which there was a shared participation in cultural phenomena – people watching the same shows and consuming the same music. But the decades saw an explosion of youth subcultures, and the Face revealed and brought together different tribes that were previously siloed off – rockabillies, rude boys, skinheads, soul heads, goths. What was important to me as a young person was that the Face told you that you didn't have to belong to one tribe; it could be cool for you to enjoy pop music and a bit of ska and a bit of soul.
The Face also did not simply report on culture, it shaped it, and it helped me build a sense of style and identity. Images created by the Buffalo movement, a fashion collective headed up by the stylist Ray Petri and the photographer Jamie Morgan, often filled the pages and the cover. Buffalo had drawn on Jamaican culture, dancehall music and hip-hop, and embraced sports labels such as Lacoste, Fila and Sergio Tacchini. It also pioneered playing around with gender representation – putting men into leather skirts with combat boots; choosing steely, masculine depictions of women over glitter and elegance.
The Face also used a diverse range of models, and had Black men as cover stars at a time when you would not see them in fashion stories or magazines anywhere else. It featured young Black male models now lost to history such as Tony Felix, Simon de Montfort and Wade Tolero. In June 1985, a month before I came out as gay to my family, the boxer Clinton McKenzie was on the cover of the Face in a beret with his muscles bursting out of his shorts and tank top. It's an image I still love now.
That truly subversive, culture-defining era of magazines feels like a bygone era now. Perhaps I cannot claim, at age 55, to be completely tapped into the youth market, but the landscape of culture and the means of its dissemination are so much broader now. The decline of print magazines in the 2000s and 2010s was a consequence of the rise of the internet and social media, which spawned millions of cultural influencers and micro-trends. While magazines such as the Face weren't gatekeepers of culture, they were published by a select few people who set the narrative. Trends now feel much less substantial and much less consequential for popular culture.
I remember being heartbroken when the Face closed down in 2004. While I had stopped collecting the magazine in the mid-90s, moving on to the more sophisticated GQ and Vanity Fair, it felt like one sign that we were entering a new era. The Face was founded at the beginning of the Thatcher era, and carried on through to New Labour and the explosion of Britpop. By the time it closed, the optimism of New Labour was crumbling, the advent of technology was not bringing the innovation and productivity gains for which we had hoped, and soon enough a financial crisis would appear on the horizon. The death of this truly British youth style bible – a symbol of growth, cultural revolution and promise – was the canary in the coalmine.
I have followed the Face from a distance since its relaunch in 2019 and am pleased to see it back. Perhaps magazines cannot shape culture in the same way as they did in my youth. The pursuit of clicks means magazines, with their additional digital presence, are now doomed to follow trends rather than set them. However, the preservation of definitive print products feels vital when our culture is dominated by an online world in which our attention is infinitely split and an identity is hard to establish. Perhaps I'll go out and buy a copy again, even if I won't have the foggiest what anything in there means any more.
Marc Thompson is a queer archivist and the lead commissioner of the London HIV Prevention Programme
As told to Jason Okundaye