The nineties, as middle-aged people such as myself are fond of recounting, was an era when it was harder than it is now to find cool things. It is easy to romanticize the labor it took, back then, to hunt down moderately obscure music, movies, or books—to see it, in retrospect, as a character-building experience. At the time, it was just annoying. But, in those years, even dull suburbs sometimes had bookstores with interesting magazines. (The one in my town was called A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books.) And magazines provided comprehensible glimpses into the vast elsewhere. When I discovered a new one, I read every word, including the ads, because a good magazine communicated a coherent sensibility, an intoxicating jumble of ideas, images, and things to buy.
I learned about the British magazine The Face in high school, when a worldly friend started talking about it and I pretended to know what it was. It featured the same kinds of stories you’d see in other guy-oriented publications, broadly speaking: profiles of movie stars, authors, and new bands; fashion spreads and music reviews. But, unlike most titles on the newsstand, which would at least hint at what was inside or how often they published, The Face maintained an air of mystery. It was founded in London, in 1980, and it revelled in the multi-racial, multicultural sensibility that was taking shape there; the pages themselves, full of vivid photography and experiments in layout and typography, communicated the era’s new possibilities. Over time, the magazine’s musical center shifted, from post-punk, soul, and 2-Tone—which fused elements of Jamaican music with punk rock—to hip-hop, electro, and club culture. But The Face was always about fluidity and collision, the strange things that happen when something drifts from its original context. It was at its best telling stories of mutation across borders, as in 1991’s “Ruder Than the Rest,” a legendary fourteen-page feature by John Godfrey, Derick Procope, and Karl Templer, which celebrated the street fashions and micro-trends of various London neighborhoods. An unfashionable French label called Chipie, for example, discovered that its roomy “Pascalou” jeans were global duds—except at shops scattered throughout England. “The kids have taken to it and done their own thing with it,” one of the store managers explained.
Paul Gorman’s “The Story of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture” (Thames & Hudson) recounts the magazine’s twenty-year history under its founder, Nick Logan. (Logan sold the magazine in 1999, and it folded in 2004.) Logan created the magazine after five years as the editor of the popular British music tabloid New Musical Express. In Mod lingo, “the face” referred to the coolest person in the scene—the best dancer, the one with the sharpest outfits. Logan had grown tired of the tightly wound hype-cycles of places like NME, which covered the newest bands and concert reviews as if they were breaking news. The Face was about style and taste from a bottom-up perspective; Logan wanted to know about the ad-hoc communities and collectives from which sounds and styles emerged, the stories of subcultures just before they crossed over and became scenes. The magazine’s writers and photographers paid attention to the minute gestures and badges that divined the real from the fake—Gorman argues that the magazine’s cool aesthetic even persuaded bands to dress better, or at least to adopt more provocative looks, so that they could keep pace with what was going on a few pages over.
“The Story of The Face” has the size and heft of a coffee-table book, with plenty of striking reproductions of famous covers and spreads. (This makes it somewhat cumbersome to read.) Gorman is a steadfast admirer, and much of the text is given over to meticulous, moment-by-moment accounts of the magazine’s inner workings, which are alternately tedious and illuminating. Reading about staff members’ deliberations, as they dealt with a serious lawsuit surrounding the supposed “outing” of an Australian pop singer, one thinks of the publishing industry’s near-constant state of fragility, even in more gilded times. When Logan was growing up, his household’s finances were always precarious, owing largely to his erratic father. As a result, Logan took the business side of The Face very seriously, and he insured that every single issue under his tenure turned at least a modest profit.
It is easy to become frustrated with “The Story of The Face” not because of what it is but because of what it could never be: a big stack of the magazines themselves, the beautiful, self-contained objects that they were. Among the magazine pages that the book reproduces is a particularly uplifting one from the May, 1992, issue, “Love Sees No Colour,” which considered how questions of identity and tolerance would play out in the decade to come. “We could live in a grim, cold Fortress Europe,” Sheryl Garratt, the magazine’s editor in the early nineties, writes, “shuttered from outside influences, and allowing ‘foreigners’ in only as guest workers on short contracts who can be shipped home whenever we’re ready. Or we can opt for an exciting, dynamic mix of cultures and races working together.” Reading it, I found myself wondering how this Zeitgeist ran through other articles in that issue, or surfaced on the letters page or in the sneaker ads. What albums came out that month to clinch the feeling that they were living in such special times?
The magazine produced a series of memorable covers over the years, from the “Hard Times” issue, from September, 1982, which anticipated a right-wing backlash against urban youth; to the “Third Summer of Love” issue, from July, 1990, which was credited with launching Kate Moss’s career. The final cover during Logan’s ownership featured Natalie Portman, and served as a tie-in for the latest “Star Wars” movie—exactly the kind of thing a younger version of The Face would not have even been in the position to reject. But one generation’s subversion is the next generation’s marketing plan. The magazine would survive for a few more years, but its identity had crumbled, in part because so many aspects of it had been nicked by others. James Truman, formerly the magazine’s New York editor, helped relaunch Details, which was probably the closest America came to having its own version of The Face. Direct British competitors, such as Loaded and Dazed and Confused, emphasized the thrills of club culture not from the vantage of the utopian or the connoisseur but, rather, the mad-for-it hedonist. And a crop of what would become known as “lad mags” picked up on the magazine’s adolescent-male gaze, turning street-fashion brinksmanship and aspirational rituals of dressing up into a kind of shameless lust.
In an essay on The Face published in Dick Hebdige’s 1988 book, “Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things,” which Gorman quotes, the British sociologist excoriates the magazine for being “hyper-conformist: more commercial than the commercial, more banal than the banal.” Hebdige had written extensively on British subculture and style, and he felt that The Face “flattened everything to the glossy world of the image, and presented its style as content.” This wasn’t what Logan intended to do, but it is a witheringly true description of what happens when identities and movements once rooted in politics and class become recast as life styles. It probably helps explain why I liked the ads just as much as the articles: they all trafficked in the same possibility of cool, and they all ended up pinned to my bedroom wall.
Now more than ever, art and commerce seem indistinguishable. (It’s true, as Gorman remarks, that there’s a direct line from The Face to newer publications like Monocle, Apartamento, and Fantastic Man, all of which can feel more like accessories than magazines.) On today’s Internet, everything is, to borrow Hebdige’s term, even flatter. There’s less time, somehow, for the depth of history—yesterday’s trends float farther and farther from their points of origin, commingling as styles without pasts, images without contexts. I do most of my reading online, and a few hundred words can take hours to digest—a paragraph of text is a launch pad to other places; I find myself falling down YouTube and eBay wormholes, my attention drifting. That state of being would have sounded like heaven to my teen-age self. It doesn’t usually feel like it now, though.
I still buy old magazines, at flea markets and bookstores as well as on the Internet. It’s not just an exercise in nostalgia, a rediscovery of cherished old codes and secrets, a daydream about pin-rolled jeans. It’s about a different experience of time. The feeling I get when I pick up an old issue of The Face is a sense of boundedness. These magazines were portals to other lives, systems of taste I learned by acquiring the small talismans and minute gestures that held these worlds up. It’s why I used to make my own zines, sending signals into the wilderness. The universe was expansive and evolving, infinite and unknowable—except for those dozen times a year when a small part of it arrived on newsstands and in certain bookstores and came, momentarily, into focus.
