There are some things in life you do not say “No” to. Everybody wants to be on Desert Island Discs. Everybody wants to dance on Strictly. Everybody wants to meet Keanu Reeves. And in the 1980s and 1990s everybody wanted to be in The Face.
The Face was more — much more — than a glossy style magazine that came out once a month. It was an event, a must-see occasion, a distillation of happeningness by which you measured how cool you were. If you were in it, you sat with the subzero gods. If you were not in it, you wished fervently that you were.
For the National Portrait Gallery to devote a sprawling, torrential, action-packed showcase to this noisy cultural phenomenon is, therefore, unsurprising. When The Face was in its prime, modern Britain was in its prime: style leader of the world, the envy of the groovy, the place to be. The surprise is that it took so long.
Those of us old enough to remember the magazine’s impact will have lots of fun in the show’s opening stretches encountering, once again, the iconic covers that beckoned you from the other side of the newsagent’s. There’s Kate Moss in an Indian headdress, still a teenager, laughing generously in a way she never did again. There’s Kurt Cobain in a dress, smoking an angry fag and killing us with his stare. There’s Sinéad O’Connor, her face reduced to some downturned eyes and a bald head, yet instantly recognisable.
As the exhibition unfolds it provides a pleasing picture of the magazine’s methods: why it got so much right, and how. The dates scattered across the walls keep us in step with the role played by chronology in the big success. Founded in May, 1980, exactly one year after Margaret Thatcher won her first election, The Face knew fiercely and instinctively who the enemy was.
In the blue corner was conservative Britain, ye olde sceptred isle, going to bed at ten o’clock, twin sets and pearls, the Grantham constituency and its gardens. In the red corner was being young, the music of the Specials, Kate Moss, the Sex Pistols, going to clubs, guys wearing make-up, the clothes of Alexander McQueen, inventing crazy stuff to wear. As long as the Thatcher era was there to oppose, The Face knew exactly where it stood. When she went, so did the certainty. It struggled on to 2004 and even managed, in 2019, to have a relaunch. But it isn’t what it was. And never could be.
The exhibition focuses chiefly on the fabulously inventive photography that popped up monthly on the hallowed pages. Not just on the grabby covers but in the picture stories running inside. The other significant cultural contribution made by The Face, the pioneering, light-filled typography of Neville Brody, is ignored. We concentrate on the famous mugs and how they were snapped.
David Beckham, looking like Mad Max, with a soiled shirt, dirty Mohican hair, blood streaming down his warrior torso, was a deliberate confection by the stylist Simon Robins, seeking to destroy Beckham’s super-clean image.
Shane MacGowan, his face emerging cheekily from a cloud of club smoke, was exactly that. “I held the camera two feet from his face. He sat down, lit a cigarette and asked if his feet were in the shot, because he wasn’t wearing socks,” the photographer Kevin Davies remembers.
The captions are jolly but they paint a revealing picture as well of the freedoms and excitement that made The Face possible. Photographer after photographer admits that the wages were low, but the opportunities rich. The editor Nick Logan, who had previously edited New Musical Express, had a vision for a new kind of glossy magazine with its finger on the pulse of happening Britain: its music, its mood, its clothes. The photographers and stylists he chose to record it needed only to be inventive.
For the tenth anniversary of punk, Simon Foxton found a striking model in the street, went shopping in an S&M store for her accoutrements and spent all night sticking studs into the dog collar that he slung about her neck. For the cover picture that probably constitutes The Face’s masterpiece, photographed by Jamie Morgan, styled by Ray Petri, the schoolboy Felix Howard was dressed in a gangster suit and persuaded to stare out at us angrily like an underage Kray twin. Poking out of his trilby is the word “Killer”. Petri, the captions tell us, would spray every model he photographed with perfume. He wanted them to smell nice as well as look good.
All this is fun to see and read. And there’s a lot of it. But built into The Face’s success were also the reasons for its decline. Creative freedom is a powerful force when it leads to invention and bravery, but it can lead, just as powerfully, to silliness and self-indulgence. Among the picture spreads that signalled The Face’s decline was the one devoted to something called the Hard Times Look, for which a gang of moneyed models posed in ragged boiler suits and torn jeans, pretending there was something creative about looking as if you slept in an alley and were down on your luck.
As the show fractures into the various fashions that came and went with increased frenzy in the latter stages of The Face’s history, there’s an unmissable sense of decline and fall. The photography gets showy. The shoots become extravagant. New technology leads to horrid new colourations. The Face’s moment had passed. But it didn’t know it yet.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to May 18