The Face Started on a Couple's Savings and Dressed a Generation

On May 1, 1980, a new monthly magazine went on sale in Britain with Jerry Dammers of The Specials on the cover. It was called The Face, and according to its Wikipedia history the first issue sold 56,000 copies. That was a respectable start for a title that its founder's employer had refused to pay for.

The founder was Nick Logan. He had edited the New Musical Express for much of the 1970s, then launched Smash Hits for the publisher Emap in 1978. When he proposed a well-designed music and style monthly, Emap's directors said no. Logan and his wife put in £3,500 of their own savings and published it themselves.

An editor with his own money

Logan knew what sold. Smash Hits had a circulation of 166,000 by the autumn of 1979, and he understood that young readers bought a look as much as a record. The Face was built on that idea. It covered music, but it covered the clothes, the clubs and the haircuts around the music with the same seriousness.

The early 1980s gave it plenty to cover. Robert Elms's articles and Derek Ridgers's photographs of London's New Romantic scene helped sales, and Logan set up a small independent publisher, Wagadon, to run the business. The photographer Nick Knight's work first appeared in issue eight in 1980, Interview Magazine notes, years before he became one of the most influential fashion photographers in Britain.

In 1982 Neville Brody became art director, and from then on the lettering and layouts were as much a part of the magazine's identity as the people on its covers. Logan added a men's title, Arena, in the autumn of 1986.

Buffalo and the men's pages

The menswear story most worth knowing runs through Ray Petri. A stylist, he led the Buffalo collective, a loose group that included the photographer Jamie Morgan, and Wikipedia credits Buffalo with shaping the magazine's style pages through the middle of the decade. Interview Magazine points to the March 1985 issue, titled Hard, with a 13-year-old Felix Howard on the cover, as one of its defining moments. Petri died of AIDS in 1989.

The look outlived him. Putting street clothes and good clothes in the same picture, styled on young men who looked like they had come straight from a club, is ordinary in men's magazines now. In the mid-1980s it still felt new.

The third summer of love

In 1990 Logan was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and took a nine-month break. When he returned he became editorial director at Wagadon, with Sheryl Garratt as editor of the magazine. That same year the art director Phil Bicker picked an unknown teenager named Kate Moss to be the face of The Face. The photographer Corinne Day shot her for the July 1990 issue, The 3rd Summer of Love, and Moss went on to become one of the defining models of the decade.

The 1990s also brought the magazine's worst day in court. In May 1992 a High Court jury found for the singer Jason Donovan in a libel claim over the magazine's suggestion that he was gay. The figures differ by source. Wikipedia gives £292,000 in damages and costs, later reduced by Donovan himself to £95,000, while Interview Magazine puts the award at £200,000. Either way it was a heavy bill for a small independent publisher.

It survived and kept selling. Wikipedia records the October 1995 issue, with Robbie Williams on the cover, as the best seller at 128,000 copies.

Sale, closure and two returns

Competition from Loaded and Dazed and Confused ate into sales in the late 1990s, and in July 1999 Logan sold Wagadon to Emap, the company that had turned him down two decades before. It did not last. By the spring of 2004 monthly sales had fallen to 40,000 and Emap closed the magazine, with the final issue in May 2004.

The name passed to Bauer when it bought Emap in 2008. In 2017 Wasted Talent, the publisher of Kerrang! and Mixmag, bought the title, and in 2019 it came back, online in April and in print on September 13, 2019, with four covers for Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Rosalía and Tyler, the Creator.

That run ended this year. The magazine announced on March 27, 2026 that it would cease operations, and Resident Advisor reports that Wasted Talent confirmed the Spring 2026 issue would be its last, citing ongoing financial losses and the difficulty of a model that relied on advertising. Two months later, on May 26, 2026, C86 and Wasted Talent announced in a joint statement that C86 Holdings had bought The Face. C86's founder is the Singapore entrepreneur Kuok Meng Ru. The statement gave no relaunch date.

Logan owned The Face from 1980 to 1999, which is nineteen years, the longest stretch of the title's life under one owner by a wide margin.

Where it lives now

The Design Museum in London added The Face to its permanent collection in 2011, and Paul Gorman's book The Story of The Face, published by Thames and Hudson in 2017, covers the Logan years in detail. Old issues trade hands among collectors, and the 1980s ones are worth finding for the style pages alone.

If you want the places the magazine wrote about, start with our guide to London's Soho and Dover Street Market. The British designer who most closely shared its taste for sharp clothes with a joke in them is Paul Smith, and the parallel story on the other side of the Atlantic is our history of hip-hop and menswear. London was also one of the cities on the map of the Stüssy International Tribe. Browse more in menswear history and music.

The Face began because a publisher turned down a good idea. Forty-six years later it has a new owner and no relaunch date, and the archive suggests the idea is still good.