Editor’s letter: winter 2024

Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.

I’ve always loved that old Walt Whitman line, ​“I contain multitudes.” I like the idea that people can change – waking up one person, going to sleep as another. Take the first of our four Winter 24/​25 cover stars, Yeat. As Kieran Press-Reynolds writes, the American rage rapper ​“seems like two people at once, constantly code-switching his persona between extraterrestrial and Noah the Nobody. One moment, he’s showing me his lock screen, a damn Minions meme (for the uninitiated, he made a viral song for the Minions movie). The next he’s telling me with grave conviction that he was the victim of a terrifying alien visitation when he was nine.” Yeat contains multitudes.

The same is true for Nicholas Alexander Chavez, who catapulted to fame playing Lyle in Ryan Murphy’s global Netflix smash Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story – the actor’s first lead role. As Nicholas tells Ben Reardon, ​“People have always said I have a dark side.” It’s one the 25-year-old explored in a brilliant cover story by photographer Steven Klein: ​“As an actor, I’ve gone through so many phases of self. I’m still evolving. It feels like every few months, a new version of me dies and is born.” Nicholas contains multitudes – an artist of depths, layers and, yes, contradictions.

There’s a very obvious multiplicity to photographer Collier Schorr’s story, The Performance of Others, which sees model Amelia Gray take on the role of a lifetime, as both performer and audience. For visual inspiration Collier drew on a 1984 copy of feminist journal Heresies to examine the roles that women are expected to play – not only in theatre but in the wider world, too. As embodied in the fantastic styling of FACE Fashion Director Danielle Emerson, Amelia is a woman of parts– one who contains multitudes, too.

Perhaps the most powerful example, however, comes in Serhiy Morgunov’s extraordinary report from Ukraine. Oleh, Oleksandr and Vlad are all 25. All three men are soldiers. All three men are queer. As Serhiy writes, while they’ve each been thrown into a fight for national survival, ​“they’re also on the front line of another fight: that of civil rights, tolerance, acceptance”. Oleh, Olesksandr and Vlad are shining examples of the multi-faceted people we each are, or can be.

THE FACE is large – it contains multitudes, too

Matthew Whitehouse, Editor-in-Chief

London, November 2024