Isabella Blow for The Face.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption='<em>The Dark Knight Returns</em> by Sean Ellis, styled by Isabella Blow, August 1998. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Sean Ellis</span>’>
Recently, curatorial consultant Lee Swillingham told Observer “…a completely true story.” Photographer Sean Ellis and stylist Isabella Blow collaborated on a photo shoot inspired by the 1981 film Excalibur. Blow oversaw the fashion: armor against a dark, cloudy sky. “There was [Alexander] Lee McQueen holding the sword, and just for a moment, it looked like an extremely old painting—it all of a sudden felt timeless. I said to Sean jokingly, ‘I think this will hang in the National Portrait Gallery one day,’” Swillingham recalled.
Twenty-seven years later, Swillingham’s prediction came true. At London’s National Portrait Gallery, “The Face Magazine: Culture Shift” celebrates the enduring, boundary-pushing imagery that first appeared on the pages of this youth-oriented publication—with visually arresting style and hints of humor.
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The Face’s staff and its collaborators—from 1980 to 2004, with a relaunch in 2019—gave off a vibe that they were ahead of their peers. This immersive presentation spanning two and a half decades lives up to what Swillingham, a former art director for the magazine (1992-1999), told us: “The Face is kind of a pillar of British pop culture, like music and art where it’s by definition on the edge of culture and avant-garde culture. British pop culture’s always been pretty much about risk-taking.”
Founded by Nick Logan and his then-wife, Julie Hillier, the couple used £3,500 of their own money to start The Face. According to the curatorial note on the walls of this exhibition, “The name Logan chose for his magazine was coined from Sixties mod subculture—a ‘face’ being someone with the right clothes, the right haircut and the right taste in music.”
Though the magazine’s past is more strongly tied to fashion than to its other features (music, film and politics), the curators behind “Culture Shift” (Swillingham, Sabina Jaskot-Gill and Norbert Schoerner) made a concerted effort to remind visitors of its nascent origins—after all, Logan was an editor at New Musical Express and creator of Smash Hits. Upon entry as well as on exit, looping instrumentals from Portishead’s “Glory Box” and Blur’s “Boys and Girls” greet exhibition visitors. On one wall of the galleries, you can download a Spotify playlist that includes tunes from bands across genres and eras: Madness, Joy Division, Grace Jones, New Order, Sade, The Pogues, Soul II Soul, Björk, Oasis, Massive Attack, Jay-Z and Chappell Roan—to name a few.
Much like the making of a mix tape, the curators of “Culture Shift” selected a ‘greatest hits’ of images, according to Swillingham. Featured are more than eighty photographers who captured one-of-a-kind shots for the magazine: Jeanette Beckman, Elaine Constantine, Ellen Von Unwerth, Juergen Teller, Anton Corbijn, David LaChapelle and Inez and Vinoodh, among many others. And the portraiture represents a wide spectrum of popular culture: Boy George, Sade, LL Cool J, Run DMC, George Michael, Madonna, Iggy Pop, the Spice Girls, and Kurt Cobain plus celebrities like David Beckham and Leonardo DiCaprio. Eurythmics fans might notice the iconic photo of a masked Annie Lennox lensed by Peter Ashworth from the October 1983 cover of The Face and then the album art for Touch (which includes the hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”
The magazine’s archive of popular culture runs deep, and the list of notable people who graced the pages is long. One especially time-transcendent legend stands out, however.
The Face takes credit for launching the careers of photographer Corinne Day and model Kate Moss. Day presented a photo of Moss to former art director Phil Bicker in the early 1990s. In the exhibition catalogue, Bicker said, “I had been looking for a model who reflected the demographic of our readership and projected the spirit of the magazine. I knew at once I had found her. I realized she was the face of The Face.” Moss first appeared on the July 1990 cover with a smile of pure bliss.
“If you got seen in the magazine, other people would want to work with you,” Swillingham said. “I saw that time and time again. I would commission a photographer, and we’d do a shoot and then do another shoot and then Vogue would call them.”
The creative powers of The Face also pushed beauty conventions beyond the corporate norms of magazines during its tenure. In Glen Luchford’s photo Modern Love (1992), Filipino-American model and fashion designer Zaldy Goco dressed in drag to glamorous effect. In a gallery titled “Buffalo,” we see how photographer Jamie Morgan and stylist Ray Petri challenged gender stereotypes with their counterculture Buffalo style: men dressed in kilts and sarongs with exposed legs and Doc Martens. They sought their models on the streets and in boxing clubs at a time when modeling agencies provided homogenous talent.
Both wanted to reflect something very different in visual storytelling. “Buffalo saw beauty in mixing culture, race, age and gender. Boys were softer and women stronger,” wrote Mitzi Lorenz, a stylist, in the exhibition catalogue. (Neneh Cherry’s hit single, “Buffalo Stance” alluded to the spirit of the movement.)
Inspired by the inclusionary soul of The Face, the curatorial team did their best to give credit to all people involved in the photo shoots—not just the photographers and models but also the hair and makeup artists—when they could. This bridge between the past and present remains a positive force in “Culture Shift,” and that includes the connection between younger and older generations.
“We’re getting so much positive feedback—especially younger people who are like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve not seen hardly any of this stuff,’ because this isn’t really a digital archive of The Face,” Swillingham pointed out. “A lot of this stuff people will be seeing for the first time unless they’ve collected the old issues.”
This enthusiasm cuts across both the magazine’s masthead and its audience: the teams behind The Face wanted to produce what inspired them and shared it with their readership in order to get them excited, whether it was an album release or a recent fashion collection on the runways. Or perhaps a brilliant film. The people behind The Face were experiencing what they were writing and photographing—without a corporate entity dictating what they could or couldn’t publish.
“I was the customer,” said Swillingham. “We all hung out together. We went to the same films. We were right there living it.”
“The Face Magazine: Culture Shift” is on view at The National Portrait Gallery in London through May 18, 2025.
