by Speed Sex Gore Aggro promised a year 1998. The cover star was Alexander McQueen and looked like a revenant with blanched white skin and blood red eyes. “He wanted to express the idea of the burning anger that Joan of Arc burned on the stake,” recalls the photographer Nick Knight.
In its first run between 1980 and 2004, the cult style magazine served this enthusiastic young readers this kind of madness every month. The face even managed to make David Beckham dirty, with soy sauce and coffee that dribble over his abdominal muscles. This exhibition is adequately lively and with more than 200 photographs by 80 photographers, it convincingly shows the influence and boldness of the publication. It is a riotic frolicker through two decades of British fashion, from the new romance to Gothic romance, through grunge and a bit of medieval imagination.
Of course, some of them look incredibly outdated. But the rough sense of the fun of the face never swings, which are improved by drastic wall texts that run off art jargon in favor of anecdotes from photographers and stylists. In a portrait from below, an open-mouth-Norman Anderson, also known as the broadcaster NORMASKI, devour the entire framework. The picture, which was taken in December 1992, comes alive with the insight of photographer Jake Chessum: “He speaks quickly and continuously on his voice. So I came nearby and let him rip. “
This fast and angry energy also seems to be due to the latest magazine. Glen Luchford reminds us of Margaret Thatchers, the now incredibly sounding youth OPTUNITY program: collect £ 1,000 and the government would correspond to this amount, give £ 27 a week and pay most of their rent. The photographer writes: “Anyone I knew who worked on the face at the beginning was in this scheme.”
Related: Kate, Kylie, Kim … and a Topless Iggy: Faces of the face magazine – in pictures
The 1990s were the most successful era of the face, and the photographs from back then illustrate the moods and movements that marked this decade, from Rave to Britpop, hedonism to neoliberalism. The more interesting moments are the less obviously legendary (like Kate Moss by Juergen Teller), overlooked moments of originality and pure device. A fashion image, shot by Norbert Schoerner and designed by Greg Fay and Justin Laurie, sees the carved model Rufus Jordan in a sharp suit and cufflink with a Tesco bag over the head. “The styling was our comment on British society,” notes Fay. “The cufflinks came from a man who drank in my father’s pub.” Unorthodox approaches were encouraged – Nigel Shafran drove with a bag of fake Louis Vuitton clothing through London and asked the people on the street to put them on.
This exhibition shows that the magazine influenced two major changes in fashion photography. The first was the change from the location shoots to Studios, where the photographer and the topic could build their own world and be more experimental. Shots for the face could be demanding and take all day. The second were the closer cooperation that promoted photographers and stylists: explosive creative couplings such as the late guilt and Jean-Baptiste Mondino; Melanie Ward and Corinne Day; Isabella Blow and Sean Ellis.
The face was loud, left and unadorned British. His passion could also be a little bombastic, and sometimes this exhibition soaked with nostalgia begins the umbilical blue and especially in the section that is dedicated to this day (the magazine was restarted in 2019). But it cannot be denied that the energy in the rooms for hits from Neneh Cherry, Elastica and Daft punk came from an assembly film at the entrance to the exhibition. The face had reached mythological status before it was folded in 2004. And until then the young people were in a new thing: the Internet.
