Both magazines were done on a meagre budget yet managed to concoct this mirage of hip London that they transmitted all across the country and indeed internationally. (Joy bought both religiously).
If you look at an old issue now, especially early on, you can see how Face and iD were cobbled together in a last-minute dash just like the music papers. All kind of no-hope chancers getting featurettes, completely forgotten groups and motormouth types hawking something or other.
I remember Kodwo Eshun - I had no idea then who he was going to become! - came up to interview me (supposedly for the Oxford student mag Cherwell - I think he just wanted to meet). During a lively conversation at an outdoor table in Endell Street, he expressed disappointment that we hadn't gone straight from Monitor to The Face and iD. Like it hurt him to have to pick up a copy of Melody Maker every week, this broadsheet that left ink on your fingers.
But I rather liked the idea of operating from this supposedly clapped-out, obsolesced institution, going against the grain of times. (When the grain of the times was things like Absolute Beginners).
Besides, the format was in alignment with what we were pushing - a resurgent rock underground.
Also the music papers came out 51 times a year, whereas the style mags came out monthly. So there was just vastly more space for our verbosity to frolic in.
I should imagine it was very hard for a freelancer writing for a style magazine to make enough to live on, given you only have 12 paydays a year. And I seem to remember the iD word rate was modest, no better and possibly worse than the frightful word-rate at MM. At MM, if you were prolific and voluble, you could make a nice living as a freelancer, simply because there was so much space to fill.
The 51 issues (Xmas a double, lasted a fortnight) enabled you to construct more of an ongoing world.
That's what all these magazines were about - world creation, world maintenance.
I miss that. Is there any publication today, print or online that does that?
Well, No Bells does. They have meet-ups, events where people read music criticism aloud. It's a social space, not just a disembodied discourse space. The magazine is a locus of vibe.
Talking of style bibles, on a recent trip to New York, we went into a store that was choc-a-block with magazines into cutting edge fashion. Sort of modern day equivalents to iD and Face (both of those still going of course, as print entities - and bigger than ever in a literal sense - each issue is a monstrous paving stone of glossy fashion spreads, adverts, something you could injure yourself with if you picked it up without bending your knees properly, or injure someone else with, if wielded as weapon.)
I was staggered by how many of these style magazines there were - piled up everywhere, not an inch of space in this hipster newsagent I guess. From all over the world, with Steve McQueen-esque ugly-as-beauty images on the front.
Rather like with art books, I wondered what the financial and production logistics are when doing a magazine like this - quality paper stock, full gloss ultra-vivid images. The bottom line.
Do all the photographers and models and make-up and styling people just work for free in the hope of furthering their careers?
Advertising must bring in some money, from fashion and beauty products and trendy shit. But the cost of doing something so luxurious looking and feeling, and in presumably quite small print runs, must be enormous. And then the physical cost of distributing something so bulky. The shops must take a hefty mark-up given the amount of sheer volume each issue takes up.
Also rather like with art books, I wondered who actually buys these things,... They seemed to be retailing anywhere from $20 to $40 bucks each. I have a mental block with paying that for a magazine.
So I guess very rich people, or cutting edge fashion obsessives (same difference?).
And they doubtless function less as something to actually read and more like a coffee table book. Something to flick through desultorily or just have sitting there.
Still mystified by the title of this sports-as-style-microculture magazine
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Paul Oldfield fires a salvo at The Face on the occasion of its 100th isssue.
And also analyses Neville Brody's work.
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Wandering around NYC I was amazed how saturated everywhere was with fashion advertising. I mean, yes it's always been there, but it was really kind of total in places like SoHo. Enormous, glossy images. Everything hyper-real and supersaturated. Often on LED screens rather than just posters.
Was also startled by the fashionization of Dr. Martens
I remember in the 1980s having to going to a rather poky, plain shop next to Camden tube station to get DMs. The kind of place that would do shoe repairs and cut keys as well as sell shoes. (Actually I might be imagining that aspect but it certainly had nothing fashion boutiquey about it).
DMs were "cool" through the skin and punk connection, but they still had some kind of residual currency as practical footwear, the kind of thing someone who worked in a factory or on a building site might wear for protection against things falling on the foot.
I expect this chic-ification has been going on for a while and I hadn't noticed.
Our kid asked for a pair of DMs some years ago and only wore them once - I was furious. They cost about $130.
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"the treacherous Elms"
Carlyle had this type figured a century plus earlier
"First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a German Professor, of unequalled learning and acumen, writes his enormous Volume to demonstrate, has sprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth. What Teufelsdröckh would call a 'Divine Idea of Cloth' is born with him; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes."
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R.Elms makes a cameo in this report on Marxism Today's 1986 conference on the Left's problem with style and hedonism for its own sake
