For those of us old enough to remember, The Face magazine has always been the coolest mag since its launch back in 1980. The Face was a showcase for avant-garde music and fashion which entered youth consciousness, set trends and put a young model called Kate Moss on its cover. From punk to Britpop, The Face didn’t just reflect young people’s interests, it shaped youth culture over two of the most politically defining decades of the UK’s history. Against the backdrop of a right-wing Conservative government, The Face championed innovation and diversity cutting across class, race, sexuality and regional divides.
From the Bauhaus and Constructivist influenced graphics in the layout, to the highly original, iconic images which launched the careers of photographers like Juergen Teller and Corinne Day, to its cutting-edge typography, The Face set a new paradigm for design which reached far beyond publishing. Yet this wasn’t just style over substance; The Face was just as pioneering in its journalism with Gavin Hills winning an Amnesty International Media Award for a feature on child soldiers in Somalia in 1994.
The Face relaunched last year and happily retains the grit, irreverence and pioneering spirit of its former incarnation. A quick scroll through its website takes you from Afropop artist Davido supporting the #EndSARS campaign in his native Nigeria, to a retrospective of Sunil Gupta’s photographs of members of LGBTQ+ communities at the Photographer’s Gallery in London to a renewed interest in the Blackpool Grime star Millie B via TikTok.
In the latest issue is an engaging perspective on youth unemployment from journalist Francisco Garcia as he talks to young people in Margate about the challenges of getting a job and our own Head of Strategy, Anna Darnell, sharing the stats and the bigger picture. Youth Futures Foundation is all about finding out what works to help those young people into meaningful work and we will be as bold, as innovative and as pioneering as this peerless magazine always has been.
