For 20-Odd Years, One Magazine Recorded What Britain's Non-Mainstream Kids Were Into. Now It's Back From the Dead

Oh, The Face, the bible of subculture.

Not long ago the British electronic dance magazine Mixmag bought The Face, a magazine that had been dead for 13 years, for an undisclosed price.

The Face was born in 1980 and folded in 2004. It was once called the bible of trend culture.

It covered music, street culture, politics and much else, and it made names of photographers, stylists and models of wildly different kinds. It caught 16-year-old Kate Moss's innocent smile, put Kurt Cobain on the cover in a dress, and in 1998 ran Alexander McQueen on the cover as a vampire.

The Face really did create a lot of unforgettable moments. Now the news that it plans to come back has excited quite a few people.

Sheryl Garratt, a former editor, is convinced that in the internet age The Face's job — filtering information, setting trends — only becomes more valuable. Another former editor, Richard Benson, thinks there will always be a 19-year-old living out in the suburbs who wants to know what is popular right now, and that appetite is never satisfied.

As a microcosm of British youth culture, The Face witnessed a short stretch of history: the rise and the decline of British subculture. It was not the first vehicle to record that subculture, but it is still the most representative one.

As early as 1955, the freelance photographer Ken Russell shot a set of documentary pictures of Teddy Girls in London's East End — The Last of the Teddy Girls — published in the June issue of Picture Post, one of the earliest photo stories about postwar youth culture. But before The Face existed, the keywords of 1960s British subculture, from Teddy Boys and Mods to Skinheads, sat scattered across a few pictorials and fashion titles, and rarely reached the public as a coherent series.

By the mid-to-late 1970s, as British documentary photography revived, young photographers recorded the youth subcultures around them with real enthusiasm. The Face came out of that moment.

The Face aimed at readers aged 16 to 25. It put music, film, street culture and art, fashion and design all in one place, breaking the conventional way magazines were sorted. No magazine had done that before.

Terry Jones, a former art director of British Vogue, founded i-D the same year. That magazine counted as The Face's contemporary rival. It followed close behind, publishing officially in August 1980, 40 pages in all. It, too, ran commentary and reporting on photography, design, fashion and style, trying to pull away from the taste of mainstream fashion magazines and toward the street.

When Nick Logan founded The Face, he had no idea it would matter so much over the next twenty-odd years. Logan had been an editor at NME, the British magazine that told you what to listen to outside the mainstream, and he had his own ideas about music and pop.

On May 1, 1980, Logan put up £3,500 of his own money and published the first issue of The Face. Smash Hits, which he had founded in 1978, was still running at the time, and he worked with a small team of his own; The Face looked more like a sudden impulse, a test.

Logan joined forces with Neville Brody, the master graphic designer who is now a star of British print, and together they set The Face's style. Brody made new typefaces for the magazine. His use of noisy graphics, distorted letterforms and piles of icons was ahead of its time and freed the magazine's pages from standard layout. It still doesn't look dated.

Follow The Face and you can look back at what British young people were keen on across those twenty-odd years.

British youth culture in the 1980s began with the New Romantic movement.

New Romanticism was neoclassical glam rock married to fashion, and the strange look swept fast through London, Birmingham and other cities. It started in 1979 and peaked in 1981. Clubs like Billy's and Blitz, and boutiques like PX in London and Kahn in Birmingham, all stood for it.

New Romanticism can be read as an answer to the punk that was popular in the late 1970s. Deeply marked by the glam rock star David Bowie, it added fresh, fashionable elements to a punk scene that was turning dull. The New Romantics used eyeliner and red lipstick and ruffled dandy shirts to build an air of blurred gender. It went by other names too: the Futurists, the cult with no name.

Another part of punk's following, meanwhile, went further underground, where the music turned faster, noisier and stiffer into hardcore punk. Violence and drink were still there in the punk world, but this was also when a serious, self-disciplined form grew up — Straight Edge. Its people rejected the heavy drinking, the fighting, the drugs and the casual sex of the punk scene, and argued for abstinence. The name came from “Straight Edge,” a 1981 song by the legendary band Minor Threat, and with it a positive, healthy hardcore punk formally split off from punk.

In the late 1980s Nirvana arrived and made grunge popular. The band's singer Kurt Cobain, on the cover of The Face in a floral dress and heavy eye shadow, became one of the magazine's most famous cover subjects.

Into the 1990s, the shifts in British subculture that The Face showed came in two parts: photography and music.

Perhaps 1980s fashion photography still felt remote to ordinary people, a desire they could not reach. The Face's unusual fashion photography gradually made its name, and it made stars of photographers including Juergen Teller, a frequent collaborator with Marc Jacobs, along with David LaChapelle, David Sims and others.

But in the early 1990s the British art director Phil Bicker commissioned Corinne Day, a former model, to shoot an autobiographical set of pictures for The Face, and that began to change things. The pictures showed Day's own life of pleasure, and a performance by Kate Moss. For the first time the weight of the photograph moved from the photographer to the person photographed.

When 16-year-old Kate Moss appeared on the cover of The Face with her eyes narrowed, this different sort of girl quickly became the magazine's muse. She was thin and unpolished, nothing like the famous models of the day, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. In front of the lens what she showed you, freely, was simply herself; you could see no trace of the photographer's opinion steering the frame. Moss shot five more covers for The Face, and as she became an icon of the 1990s she carried the magazine to its peak.

London in the 1990s was drunk on many kinds of music: disco, funk, rave, acid house, jungle. British young people at the time were deeply influenced by American culture; they grew up watching films like Jackass and American Pie.

Under that wave of foreign culture, the most British things were rave and the jungle music that later grew out of it.

Rave means a British electronic party culture that first appeared in the late 1980s. It meant underground parties that played acid house or hardcore records and were awash with psychedelic drugs, and it reached America in the early 1990s.

Jungle was born in the early 1990s. In the post-Thatcher years, the anxiety of London's lower-class young people about an unstable economy turned, inside the rush of sound, into a posture of not caring. The music brought in heavy breakbeats and faster tempos. It came from rave, yet was hard to file under any one category. It was even spoken of alongside American hip-hop and Jamaican reggae, and was taken as the best way to carry the life of London's streets.

Jungle was known for showy, eye-catching clothes. Everyone loved flamboyant printed shirts from Moschino, Versace and Iceberg, blazers, three-piece suits, flat loafers, sunglasses.

An MC called Bushkin told i-D that back then a lot of people came to shows just to see what he was wearing. “I wore a Moschino suit covered in Shakespeare, and suddenly all sorts of nobodies wanted to be my friend.”

At the same time, emo, very emotional, came out of the hardcore punk world and by the late 1990s was a major force in underground rock.

The word emo carried a feminine edge. Boys of this period also started wearing women's jeans, tight clothes and belts studded with metal spikes, and straightened their hair.

Kerrang!, the British rock magazine also founded in the early 1980s, had not caught up with the phenomenon before emo's supporters went off to social networks like MySpace, Limewire and Kazaa and spread emo culture themselves.

Using MSN group chats, they introduced each other to the music they liked and slowly formed small groups of their own. The more direct ones simply took a line from a favorite song as their MSN name — social networks were starting to replace traditional magazines as the most fashionable ground for British youth.

The internet did pull attention away from magazines. But that was not the real reason The Face declined.

In fact its founder, Nick Logan, had stopped editing The Face by 1990, and in 1999 he sold it to EMAP, the well-known British magazine group that owns FHM.

By then The Face faced more competitors, and changes in taste and in the way people lived. Dazed & Confused, launched in 1991, was known for high-quality music and film coverage. The French magazine Purple, founded in 1992, collected stylish bars and cafes and stood for good taste. And Pop, founded in 2000, belonged to EMAP alongside The Face at the time; Jason Donovan edited both magazines and gradually moved his attention to Pop.

The Face closed for good in 2004. Whether it can really recover its old glory, the way its former editors hope, is not yet known.

Images from: theguardian, pinterest