It’s a black-and white photo.
A freckled-face girl, in her mid-teens, on a windy beach. She’s wearing a feathered head-dress – probably a child’s dress-up toy. And she’s laughing, a goofy grin that shows slightly uneven teeth and makes her eyes shine and her nose wrinkle. It’s not a glamorous shot. But it is joyful.
The year is 1990. The photograph is by Corinne Day, who is now considered a pioneer of a whole new aesthetic in fashion photography, although she often saw herself as more documentary/reportage. The stylist was Melanie Ward, now a hugely influential figure in the fashion world.
The model is of course a then-unknown Kate Moss. It was the second time she’d been on the cover of The Face, the magazine I edited at the time. But the first time anyone really noticed.
She was still at school when she did this shoot, and it would be a few more years before she would be routinely referred to as a supermodel.
This cover has become iconic.
It has featured in countless shows, books, articles, most recently in the Culture Shift exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Because I was there, I thought it might be useful to tell the story behind it – or my blurred memory of it, anyway. I think there are useful things to learn from it.
The truth is, it was never intended to be the cover at all.
The Stone Roses played their now-legendary gig at Spike Island just before we were due to go to press, and we’d planned to use an image from that event. But when we looked at the pictures, it just wasn’t there.
It wasn’t the fault of the photographers.
Patrick Harrison was covering the event for us, and last year his fine images came out in a book, Spike Island, alongside images by Dave Swindells and Peter Walsh and with an introduction by yours truly. The photos were great, but nothing quite worked as a cover.
So the magazine’s art director, Phil Bicker, tried some other ideas.
We had an interview with US comedian Sandra Bernhard in the issue, with an excellent portrait by Herb Ritts. It worked well as a cover, but just didn’t suit the moment we were trying to capture. So Phil moved on to the fashion story.
He tried various images, but kept going back to Kate in the head-dress.
Except it wasn’t quite right.
When he showed the whole head-dress, the image was too small. When he cropped in, it looked like Kate was wearing a weird fluffy hat. Eventually, he had the idea of cutting round the tips of the feathers, and putting them over the magazine’s masthead.
This shouldn’t have worked. The cardinal rule of any magazine cover is to show the magazine’s title clearly, so buyers can recognise it on the newsstands.
But. Our logo was always the same red. Most of the type was still visible – enough to recognise it, if you knew it. And it just felt.. right. Cheeky. Subversive. Joyful.
Looking at that cover now, I still wince a little.
The cut-out of the feathers is quite crude. By then we were already running late, there was no time to finesse it. There are far too many cover-lines, and they’re not my best writing.
But we were frantically trying to create a last-minute link between a fashion story, Spike Island and the rest of the content, and throw in some names to entice readers to buy a magazine with an unknown on the cover. (And yup, Mickey Rourke was one of those names.)
Overall, I felt it wasn’t our best cover, and it wouldn’t sell particularly well. But I was proud of it. It was one of those days when we pulled together as a team, and made it work against the odds. And it felt right for the direction we were taking the magazine in.
The team was under a lot of pressure.
As The Face approached its 100th issue in September 1989, the magazine’s brilliant founder, Nick Logan, considered closing it. This would have been a magnificent gesture which would have sealed its reputation at the definitive magazine of the 80s.
But acid house was happening, British youth culture was resurgent and I was convinced the magazine still had plenty to say in the 90s, and a whole new audience to reach.
Having persuaded him of this, however, I needed to increase sales quickly, so the magazine could survive in the face of fierce new competition.
I honestly can’t remember how that issue did sell.
It was 35 years ago, and the figures have long since faded from memory. But time has been kind to that cover. It’s an image that is used, again and again, when talking about youth culture of the 90s, or the new aesthetic Phil Bicker was exploring with emerging photographers such as Corinne Day, David Sims and Nigel Shaffran.
I didn’t always understand that aesthetic. Phil didn’t always understand the editorial direction I was taking. All of us were constrained by tight budgets, lack of equipment, time, people.
Yet we made this. Together.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
We’re all doing our best, in the moment. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But here are the lessons I can now see, in this cover.
- Constraints often help creativity. Given more time and money, we’d have probably done something different that issue. Yet it worked.
- Rules are made to be broken. But you have to learn the rules, and understand why they work, to do this effectively.
- Trust your instincts. Try new things. Then if it doesn’t feel right to you, pivot. Try something else.
- You can’t predict the future. You never know how your work will be received, or what it will come to mean. Don’t over-think it. Put it out there. Then move on to your next idea. Let the world decide how good it is.
And finally, a challenge.
Give yourself some constraints. A time limit. A budget. The medium or channel you will work in.
Then find some work you’ve already made, and use it. Create something new with it. Break some rules. Trust your process, your instincts. Then share it with the world.
And let me know what happens!
What do you think?