Spring 2025
About Face
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
National Portrait Gallery, London, 20 February – 18 May 2025 Reviewed by Steve Taylor
‘The Face Magazine: Culture Shift’, at London’s National Portrait Gallery until 18 May, is a visual cornucopia of ‘iconic fashion images and portraits’ from the groundbreaking publication, writes Steve Taylor. Arranged in a chronological series of boldly curated tableaux, the show follows a loosely Zeitgeist-y periodisation, bracketing images within serial youth and fashion cultures. The origins of The Face in music are often glossed over, so it’s good to see the words ‘Rock’s Final Frontier’ – briefly the magazine’s strapline – as the heading to one explanatory text. Face founder Nick Logan described it to me at the time as ‘the NME’s colour supplement’, aimed at the music paper’s readers as they moved into their twenties and into places of their own – those were the days! – and as their interests broadened out into style, film and the broader culture.
Music was melded with fashion from the very early issues, when it was styled and shot by photographers such as Sheila Rock, before dedicated stylists took a lead role in The Face’s creative process. Neville Brody gets due credit as its most famous art director, less so as an innovative typographer and designer.
Right. The Face no.
48 featuring Sade, April 1984.
Top. Exhibition installation photo by David
Parry.
Moving through regimes of successive art directors – including Robin Derrick, Phil Bicker, and Lee Swillingham (co-curator of the NPG show) – the show documents the magazine performing a tricky balancing act between championing successive music / youth culture movements and the demands of the fashion industry, not always managing to reconcile their conflicting agendas.
While the show is visually ravishing, the extensive captioning could have benefitted from a dose of editorial scepticism. When stylist Melanie Ward says ‘our motivation was purely creative, there were no commercial concerns’, I was reminded of a call from an Italian fashion PR threatening to pull a heap of advertising if I failed to write up a lavish press trip. However iconic the style mag, there is still no such thing as a free launch.
Steve Taylor, writer, researcher, London
First published in Eye no. 108 vol. 27, 2025
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