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The Guardian
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Black models, foreign films, queer culture – how The Face shaped me as a young man
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
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kate, Kylie, Kim … and a topless Iggy: faces of the Face magazine
From 1980 to 2004, the Face magazine played a vital role in creating contemporary culture. Musicians featured on its covers achieved global success and the models it championed – including a young Kate Moss – became the most recognisable faces of their time. A new exhibition celebrates some of the most iconic Face portraits. The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 20 February until 18 May The Face, which launched in May 1980, quickly became a cult magazine that operated outside of the mainstream but proved exceptionally influential in shaping the tastes of the nation's youth. The cover of the Face quickly became the place to be seen and, with pop stars clamouring to appear in the magazine's pages, editor Nick Logan could afford to be selective. As he recalled: 'No one could get Kim Wilde for an afternoon – but she did it for the Face' The photographers put out the idea that it was a magazine where you could be taken seriously photographically but also journalistically. Increasingly, its portraits became the images by which music stars were defined The Face was founded by Nick Logan, who had transformed the fortunes of the New Musical Express in the 1970s before successfully launching the teen music magazine Smash Hits Neville Brody, the first art director at the Face, later recalled: 'London was this thriving, humming, inspiring, exciting place to be at that time, where anything was possible' Rather than use run-of-the-mill promotional shots that featured in the music weeklies, or 'inkies', the list of contributors to the first issue reads as a who's who of the decade's most celebrated music photographers. This image was taken by Janette Beckman – you can see more of her work here This image was used on the cover of the Face in June 1990. Photographers at the magazine were given the space and freedom to create iconic images Sabina Jaskot-Gill, senior curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, writes: 'The Face has been a trailblazing title since 1980, not just documenting the contemporary cultural landscape, but playing a vital role in inventing and reinventing it. Within its pages, the Face has produced some of the most innovative fashion and portrait photography of its time' Logan spotted a gap in the market for a monthly title aimed at a youth audience interested in a broad range of subjects that weren't being featured in glossy fashion publications, teen magazines or the music weeklies. In doing so, he invented a new genre: the style magazine The Face spearheaded the influence of stylists in magazine photography. It was soon proclaiming itself 'the world's best dressed magazine' Photographers including Norbert Schoerner (a co-curator of this exhibition) and Inez & Vinoodh embraced image-manipulation and the use of computer graphics programmes such as Quantel Paintbox and Photoshop to create a new visual language for fashion photography Later in the decade, photographers moved away from digital technologies. Elaine Constantine used to photograph her images in-camera, using flash to create intense and vibrant colours that evoked nostalgic memories of carefree teenage rebellion Stylists including Polly Banks and Isabella Blow were also influential on these changing styles of imagery during the 1990s. Throughout the magazine's history, the Face allowed photographers and stylists a platform to experiment and push fashion and portrait photography in exciting new directions As photography evolved in the 1990s from analogue to digital formats, the Face was at the forefront of exploring the potential of new image-manipulation programs, which resulted in bold, colourful and 'hyperreal' images. It helped push fashion photography in a new direction – a return to glamour, but with a contemporary twist The Face ceased publication in 2004, but 15 years later was relaunched in print and online, within a radically altered publishing landscape. Navigating this new terrain, The Face has continued Logan's original vision for a disruptive, creative and inclusive magazine, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design. The exhibition closes with work from this new chapter
