From "The Face" exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to "Leigh Bowery!" at Tate Modern, young people are fascinated by the 80s – but they should remember the politics as well as the fashion
My daughter was recently getting ready for a “2010s” themed party at university. For Gen Zs, this is the decade of their teenagehood, clearly distinct from the years either side. (She wore skinny jeans, by the way, and there were lots of plaid shirts.) I realised I’d have trouble distinguishing between the first two decades of the current century – the memories of my early years are, of course, imprinted much more deeply than the blur of post-parental adulthood. But it also got me thinking about how the past is telescoped down into a few images.
My own teenage years are having a “moment” right now, with an overlapping run of 80s themed art exhibitions. Two were inspired by performance artist and wild dresser Leigh Bowery. While Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at the Fashion and Textile Museum centred on his legendary nightclub Taboo, Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a larger celebration of his boundary-breaking life and career. A third exhibition, The Face: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery, is dedicated to the art of the first youth culture magazine, which blazed a highly influential trail from 1981.
Set up by a small cohort of former music journalists, The Face celebrated multi-racial urban culture, rather than the traditional glamorous Anglo-centric fashion brands. Set up in those golden decades before the internet destroyed the economic model for magazine journalism, its beautiful pages were a visual and cerebral feast of handmade fonts and cutting-edge design, with feature spreads on what real teenagers were doing on the streets and in clubs.
A compilation of newsreel footage at the start of the exhibition tried to give you a condensed sense of the era, which I found unsettling. The 1990 poll tax riot was captured alongside the mid-80s protests against Section 28 – the legislation that made it unlawful to “intentionally promote homosexuality”. Everything felt mashed together.
It seemed that the huge number of young visitors drawn to the exhibition weren’t that interested in the politics. Rather, it was the handmade fashion that really appealed – with designers such as BodyMap stitching boutique outfits from new stretch fabrics like viscose Lycra.
The focus of some visitors on the retro fashion is sweet (like the rise of Bridgerton/Jane Austen cosplay in the era of streaming and Etsy), but looking solely at the clothes risks missing the broader context – the remarkable political and economic dissonance at the heart of The Face. Here was a glossy magazine which flourished, despite launching just before a terrible industrial recession in Britain, the like of which has not been matched since. If you looked closely at the captions on the joyous and sometimes provocative photos, you learned that many of its talented young photographers, writers and art directors were paid little.
Instead, they took up a new grant programme – the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, launched in 1983 by Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government – which guaranteed a state income of £40 a week for up to a year to young people setting up small enterprises. There is now a convincing case that this scheme essentially funded an entire generation of British creatives, including photographers, Young British Artists and Britpop musicians, who mostly turned out to be hostile to Conservativism. At a time when culture war battles are raging, the lesson being forgotten about the 80s, at least in Britain, is the strange symbiosis of a government deemed hostile to young and gay people with some of those very same creative young citizens.
We are also seeing a reassessment of the Ronald Reagan presidency. Back in 1980 there was much satire around the shock of his election. Now he’s talked of with almost reverence compared to President Trump. But many of the battles being fought today over supposed “woke” culture in arts institutions and the media were first raised back then.
In selectively remembering the 80s, we are perhaps seeking a nostalgic escape from the darker cultural future we see ahead.
This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.