ABSTRACT
The single most important point about the representations of masculinity presented by the style press was that they were plural and diverse, rather than unified and monolithic. Sean Nixon has demonstrated how the fashion plates appearing in these publications during the late 198os encoded numerous looks or poses. Edwardian fops, carrying nostalgic connotations of Englishness, rubbed shoulders with Italianate or 'Latin' classics, contemporary versions of the English city gent appeared alongside a plethora of street styles, and so on. 113 During this experimental period diversity was the keynote. No one look was endowed with special significance as the bearer of symbolic authority. Logan himself identified 'irony' as the key to success in the British men's market, thus avoiding what he saw as the 'po-faced', static images which were the hallmark of the American fashion magazines . 1 14 Representational closure was avoided on both commercial and aesthetic grounds. In this fledgling market for men's commodities the emphasis was on keeping options open, until such time as a successful consumer prototype could be discovered. For the editorial team at The Face pluralism was also part of their overall understanding of contemporary sensibility. This combination of factors worked to produce The Face and Arena as polysemic texts about masculinity. Taken together, the two magazines suggested a flurry of discourse around the subjectivity of younger men, with little movement towards stabilisation. Successive generations of post-war boys' comics, together with the teenage music papers and the hobby press, had usually worked to anchor men's identities around a set of stable icons , such as the sporting hero, or the collector. In contrast, what the style magazines appeared to offer was a seemingly endless variety of choices . We can begin by examining one highly influential strand of this iconography.
