National Portrait Gallery, London
The style monthly was loud, left-field and unabashedly British. The 200 images from 50 photographers on show reflect its furious energy and explosive creative couplings

SPEED SEX GORE AGGRO promised a 1998 cover of the Face. The cover star was Alexander McQueen, looking like a revenant with blanched white skin and blood-red eyes. “He wanted to express the idea of the burning rage felt by Joan of Arc being burned at the stake,” the photographer Nick Knight recalls.

In its initial run between 1980 and 2004, the cult style magazine served this kind of madness every month to its avid young readers. The Face even managed to make David Beckham dirty, with soy sauce and coffee dribbling down his abs. This exhibition is suitably splashy, and with more than 200 photographs by 80 photographers it convincingly demonstrates the publication’s influence and audacity. It is a riotous romp through two decades of British fashion, from New Romantics to Gothic Romantics, by way of grunge and a bit of medieval fantasy.