The Face, the seminal British style magazine that defined youth culture across the 1980s and 1990s, is planning a return following its acquisition by C86 Holdings, a Singapore-based music entrepreneur who also owns the storied music title NME. The sale marks the latest chapter in the revival of heritage media brands that have found new life under owners willing to invest in print’s cultural currency rather than treating it as a legacy cost.
For The Face, the challenge will be balancing nostalgia with relevance. The brand’s equity is built on its archive — those iconic covers and photo stories that have been cited by everyone from Raf Simons to Virgil Abloh as formative influences. But a relaunch cannot simply trade on memory. The new iteration will need to find a contemporary voice that captures the same electric connection to youth culture that defined the original, without resorting to the retro aesthetics that have become a crutch for other revived titles.
Founded in 1980 by Nick Logan, The Face was the magazine that documented the intersections of fashion, music, and club culture before those categories were collapsed into a single marketing demographic. Its visual language — a fusion of avant-garde fashion photography with street-level reportage — influenced not just editorial design but the way brands communicated with young people. The magazine closed its print edition in 2004, a casualty of the advertising recession that also claimed many of its peers.
The acquisition by C86 Holdings places The Face alongside NME under a single owner focused on music and culture publishing. The timing is notable: after years of digital-only experimentation, there has been a measured revival of interest in print magazines as objects of cultural authority, particularly among Gen Z consumers who encounter them as discoveries rather than inheritances. Independent titles like The Gentlewoman, Re-Edition, and Fantastic Man have demonstrated that print can be financially viable when positioned as a premium product rather than a mass-market one.
