If Lydon had famously sneered at Sid Vicious, “you’re not a fashion model when you’re a Sex Pistol”, The Face effectively turned all its subjects into models, even before its shift from a glammed-up music mag to a principally fashion-focused publication.
The images in the second part of the show, on the 1990s, are generally even bigger and more technically ambitious, but feel less extraordinary, perhaps because the rest of the world had caught up with The Face’s distinctive hyper style.
Margaret Thatcher, Boy George, The Spice Girls, Oasis, Damien Hirst, you name them, are all there in Culture Shift, all set to a gleefully tacky synth-pop soundtrack that takes us straight to the moment of the magazine’s launch at the dawn of the Eighties.
And if Tate Britain’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain wants to rub our noses in the grim and gritty side of the Thatcher era, this show wants to put a big celebratory smile on our faces when we’re barely through the door.
While The Face aimed to respond to – and lead – what was happening on the Street, the effect, from Eddie Monsoon’s ecstatically zinging Neneh Cherry (1988) to Janette Beckman’s wonderful snap of Run-DMC on their home street in Queens, was like looking in on some endless über-cool party.
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