About Face

I watched a great programme recently on BBC, All the young dudes Pop and Fashion. It traced the connection of music and fashion through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties and revisited tribal looks from Skinheads and Glam through New Romantic to Brit pop. The salient moments were Slade in their Skinhead Bover Boots phase,
(A young Noddy Holder with a crew cut was quite a revelation) and Jarvis Cocker confessing that the best pair of trousers he ever had he found in a skip.

The whole programme got me thinking about the connections between music and design. As the programme covered the eighties The Face magazine was mentioned. The Face was perhaps the best example of the almost symbiotic connection between cutting edge iconoclastic graphic design and new music.

Neville Brody was the ground breaking art director at The Face from 1981 till 1986. His creative use of typography and imagery set a new standard in magazine design and spawned a host of imitators The Face continued on after he left until 2004 when it ceased publication and by then it had lost its edge.

Check out some more of the covers