“The Face Magazine: Culture Shift”

Among London museums and galleries, it seems the season to revisit the 1980s, with more or less nostalgic purpose. At the more focused end of things, guided by a substantial body of work and a single artist’s intent, the Hayward Gallery’s “Linder: Danger Came Smiling” recently surveyed the post-punk photomontagist’s feminist slant on Dada juxtaposition. At Tate Britain, “The 80s: Photographing Britain” proposed a diverse view of the decade that included Black and Asian photographic collectives as well as such obvious but unalike artists as Victor Burgin, Martin Parr, and Jo Spence. Downriver at Tate Modern, “Leigh Bowery!” runs until August: an exhibition in which the scurrilous, extravagant artist, designer, and clubland monster is celebrated across too many rooms and too much ephemera. In the autumn, at the Design Museum, we’ll see whether “Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s” can transcend its exaggerating title. In the meantime, to the National Portrait Gallery to ask what this trend is about, or what it’s avoiding.

The Face was founded in 1980 by Nick Logan, an editor who had previously turned around the ailing rock paper New Musical Express and then started Smash Hits: a Day-Glo, facetious, poster-filled weekly for younger music fans. Logan’s new magazine took its title from the 1960s mod culture of his youth: a face (or ace face) was the smartest of the smart among London’s young male connoisseurs of Italian suits and amphetamine. Conceived at first as an image-conscious music monthly, The Face evolved after a couple of years into a fashion magazine with a broad cultural remit, well beyond the predictable selection of articles on view at the National Portrait Gallery: Margaret Thatcher, the AIDS crisis, the advent of rave, and so on. Of the three London magazines dominating the 1980s “style press,” i-D with its “straight up” street portraits was much cooler, and Blitz (unconnected to the club) had the better writers. But The Face was the most successful, the most—dread word—defining of its decade.

If this exhibition is to be believed, it was the photographs in The Face that tuned it just sharp of the zeitgeist, only secondarily its designers (notably Neville Brody) and barely, if at all, the writers. Though blown-up fashion photographs sometimes don’t translate to gallery walls—compare with the Bowery show for some surprising failures at scale—there are many glorious images in this show. From the early, music-oriented years: Derek Ridgers low-angles a cusp-of-fame Boy George in faux dreads and a scarlet Vivienne Westwood shirt against a colorful, corrugated warehouse wall. For the grey-green cover of the October 1987 issue with an “Into Orbit” tagline, Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s model wears a sheer Ziggy Stardust top, and her shadowed face is winged with blurry atom trails. It’s a very 1987 picture in its postmodern raid on the century so far: Metropolis via Madame Yevonde and Jean-Paul Gaultier. In the same mid-to-late-’80s room: Nick Knight’s snarling red-and-blue portrait of model Sarah Campbell for a February 1986 issue on the tenth anniversary of punk—nostalgia was general over music and fashion media that year.

What does a style magazine do when the world it describes has ceased to look very stylish? The Face coped well with the down-dressed turn in dance culture as the decade closed, adapting its photographic mood to a more intimate and chaotic register. But there are only so many shots of sweaty, massed provincial ravers in shapeless T-shirts that one can take before style departs the picture. The best images of the late 1980s and early 1990s are predictably from the likes of Juergen Teller (Björk and her young son in a hot spring in Iceland, 1993) or Corinne Day, whose “England’s Dreaming” spread of the same year, even more than her early shots of a teenage Kate Moss, best expresses the would-be-messy mood of the time. Wall texts talk up The Face’s “championing” of Britpop in the middle of the decade. But frankly this means the magazine had drifted from relevance—because which publication wasn’t running bad 1960s-pastiche studies of that retrograde musical milieu?

It’s not exactly that the quality of photography in the magazine declined over its first two decades (the magazine first closed in 2004) nor that the fashion world it covered was no longer capable of astonishments. See, for example, Ellen von Unwerth’s grainy 1994 end-of-shoot study of Naomi Campbell in only sneakers and knickers, or Knight’s 1998 portrait of a devilish Alexander McQueen. But what is missing here is much sense that a style or fashion magazine—its mood, its community, its sphere of influence—is not reducible to the seductions or surprises of its photographs as photographs. A case in point: Jamie Morgan’s images of the model (and fleeting pop star) Nick Kamen in boxers and trench coats, from the May 1984 issue. I have this very number on my desk now, and that particular fashion story is bracketed by acres of austere text, embarrassing (at the time) adverts for Wrangler jeans and the new Chris de Burgh album, thrilling instances of Brody’s Constructivism-for-the-kids approach to design. The most telling photographic portrait in the whole issue: a full page given to Ken Livingstone, leader of the heroic, doomed, left-wing Greater London Council.

A magazine, even or especially a magazine devoted to mere style, is always a contradictory reflection of its time and the future it wills into being. Not a collection of “iconic” (as the exhibition publicity had it) imagery. With its faintly pitiful addendum about the revival of The Face in print and online in 2019, this exhibition felt increasingly like a bland and market-chasing corporate presentation rather than a considered or adventurous curatorial take on the images or the cultural history in question. Why revisit the likes of Leigh Bowery or the Blitz club or The Face today? A serious answer would be about the liberations (political and personal, collective and individual) of the pose and performance, now as then. “The Face Magazine: Culture Shift” is instead increasingly out of touch with what made the magazine—in any of its phases, and however attached one might be to one’s own among them—mean something to readers.