This week The Face magazine presented over 200 iconic photographs that helped shaped British youth culture.
On Feb. 18, attendees of The Face Magazine: Culture Shift exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery found themselves transported back to a bygone era of fashion; A time period characterized by its boundary-pushing shoots featuring the likes of Madonna and Kylie Minogue among other pop culture icons and lensed by legendary photographers from Sean Ellis, Sølve Sundsbø, David Sims, Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Photographer Norbert Schoerner and Lee Swillingham, former art director of The Face – came up with the idea for the show. Featuring over 200 prints from over 80 photographers, the exhibition’s opening event acted as a kind of reunion for the creatives that cemented The Face magazine as a key artifact of fashion history. Among them was Mission magazine’s own esteemed Editor-In-Chief Karina Givargisoff who acted as Fashion Editor for the magazine and had her legendary work showcased in the exhibition.
Through this exhibition, organizers thrust a series of forgotten images into the limelight, in turn celebrating the immense influence of The Face on eighties, nineties, and noughties British culture and the general fashion landscape during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The Face debuted in 1980 under the creative direction of founder Nick Logan, paying homage to a previously ignored youth audience. Through the publication’s inception, Logan unveiled the style magazine, a new genre of publishing that has continued to impact and inform the modern fashion realm.
The new exhibition opened with a series of portraits and spreads from the magazine’s inaugural years. Through these artifacts, viewers were able to see the ways in which The Face intertwined fashion with music and thereby transformed unknown talents into musical icons. This ability earned the magazine the title of “Rock’s Final Frontier” and as the publication developed it pushed beyond the entertainment industry, becoming a landscape for stylists to experiment with the boundaries of style and for fashion photographers to break new ground on magazine photography.
This cutting-edge ability is evident throughout the exhibition with the showcase of photographs and campaigns shot and styled by influential creatives from stylist Ray Petri and photographer Jamie Morgan to the late Corinne Day, Glen Luchford and Nigel Shafran. Among these photographs sits an iconic image of the young supermodel Kate Moss. It was The Face’s own Art Director Phil Bicker who pushed the model into the public eye and in turn catapulted her to fame.
As the exhibition further unfolded, attendees were able to see the ways in which the magazine’s style developed and transformed from the rave culture aesthetic of the late 1980s and early 1990s to the vivid and bright imagery of the mid-90s. Throughout its years in print, The Face provided the perfect breeding ground for experimental fashion photography and informed the future of style with its exciting work. The magazine’s powerful creative pursuits came to a halt in 2004 as The Face ceased publication, but with the magazine’s relaunch in 2019, it has continued to occupy a prominent space within the fashion industry. It is this new work that wraps up the exhibition and finishes off an illuminating catalogue of fashion’s dynamic environment.
With the launch of this new exhibition, The National Portrait Gallery takes viewers on a trip through some of fashion’s most influential and exceptional moments. As creatives came together to see the project reach its fruition, they reconnected with the cocreators and friends of their past, and celebrated the iconic work that has fused The Face’s past with fashion’s present and its exciting future. Open to the public on Feb. 20, the exhibition is a must-see accumulation of The Face’s best moments that acts as chic evidence of the industry’s exceptional photography and takes viewers on an exciting journey through fashion’s ever-changing landscape.
All images courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery. Home title banner Madonna, by Jean Baptiste Mondino, June 1990, ©Jean Baptiste Mondino, Kate Moss, by Glen Luchford, styled by Venetia Scott, March 1993, ©Glen Luchford
Home page image by Elaine Constantine; above image “Superhighway,” by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
