In the autumn of 1979, Nick Logan — the journalist who had turned NME into the most exciting music paper in Britain and then launched Smash Hits for Emap — proposed a new magazine to his employers: a well-designed monthly with music at its core but expanding into fashion, film, nightclubbing, and social issues. Emap's directors said no. Logan and his wife invested their £3,500 savings into the project, named it The Face, and published the first issue on 1 May 1980 from the Smash Hits offices on Carnaby Street. The cover featured Jerry Dammers of The Specials, shot by Chalkie Davies. It sold 56,000 copies.
What followed was one of the most consequential editorial decisions in British publishing history. In 1982, Logan hired a young designer named Neville Brody as art director, and Brody drew on Constructivism, Bauhaus, and his own restless typographic imagination to create a visual language that would define the look of 1980s Britain. Meanwhile, the Buffalo collective — led by stylist Ray Petri with photographer Jamie Morgan — used The Face's style pages to invent a new vocabulary of fashion imagery that the mainstream industry would spend the next decade catching up with. In July 1990, a sixteen-year-old Kate Moss appeared in print for the first time, photographed by Corinne Day on a beach in Camber Sands.
The gallery of cover stars reads like a cultural history of the late twentieth century: Alexander McQueen, Grace Jones, David Beckham, Beyoncé, Björk, New Order, The Stone Roses. The magazine's readership peaked at 128,000 in October 1995. By 2004, The Face had closed — a casualty of the same forces that were killing print culture across the industry. But the legacy was already permanent: in 2011, the Design Museum added The Face to its permanent collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum has since featured it in multiple exhibitions on British design and fashion.
In 2019, Wasted Talent's Jerry Perkins relaunched The Face online and then as a print quarterly, with Bureau Borsche's Mirko Borsche redesigning the visual identity and Stuart Brumfitt as editor. The first physical issue since the relaunch appeared on 13 September 2019, with a choice of four covers: Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Rosalía, and Tyler, the Creator. In 2025, the National Portrait Gallery opened Culture Shift, an exhibition celebrating the magazine's first twenty-five years through its most iconic portraits. Logan, now in his late seventies, was asked by current editor Matthew Whitehouse what advice he had. His answer was characteristically terse: keep going.
Explore The Face at <a href="https://theface.com/" target="\_blank">theface.com