This New Exhibit Captures Fashion’s ’90s Golden Age

The opening weekend of “The ’90s: Art & Fashion” is, unsurprisingly, heaving with people. It’s midday on a Saturday, and on the top floor of Tate Britain in London, a woman in Stella McCartney cork-soled derby platforms enters the exhibition, followed by a father and son in jeans and T-shirts. Flanking the entrance, blown-up photographs offer a taste of the show, which was curated by British fashion luminary Edward Enninful: the now-ubiquitous image of Kate Moss in a sheer slip at the 1993 Look of the Year contest; Naomi Campbell and Moss on a stoop, ciggies in hand, photographed by Steven Klein. A retro TV with nine screens plays Pulp’s “Common People.”

The same buzzy energy is palpable inside the first space, titled “Be Real.” Chatter fills the air as couples and friends wander around. The room offers a timeline of British grunge, rebellion, and grit against a turbulent political backdrop, from Margaret Thatcher’s resignation in 1990 to the recession that followed and the growing cynicism of the era. In turn, a new wave of photographers turned their lenses on youth culture in a raw and often irreverent way.

“Photography became a key medium for this new kind of realism,” says Tate curator Helen Little. “From intimate portraits of young models arriving for castings with a sense of teenage enthusiasm or awkwardness, androgynous boys and girls lounging around on shabby sofas in secondhand clothes, to groups of young people hanging out with their friends at a local shopping center, this new kind of grubby realism shattered aspirational fantasies of commercial fashion imagery.”

Naturally, the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who rose to fame in the ’90s, is in the mix of image makers. One photograph of a young woman and man dressed in a white dress and an army skirt subverts gender codes. Nearby, a year’s worth of photographs documents the aspiring models who passed through Tillmans’s studio: one perched on a car’s hood, another mid-handstand. At the room’s center, a pair of Doc Martens owned by British artist Sarah Lucas, with razor blades inside, speaks to the era’s spiky aesthetic and the threat of street violence, with Lucas’s placard stating, “To walk around in some areas you had to be a bit tough.”

Further inside the first room, it’s less thin brows, naked dresses, and iridescent lipstick and more vulnerable portraits of supermodels. Kate Moss looks straight into the lens from a room at home, photographed after a fight with her boyfriend. That same intimacy runs through the “England’s Dreaming” series by Corinne Day, whose raw portraits of youth culture made her one of the defining photographers of the early ’90s. Shot in a barely furnished, dingy flat (Day opened up her own home for some of the images), the series, which first appeared in the August 1993 issue of The Face, shows models Rosemary Ferguson and the mononymic George at ease and unbothered. Styled by Melanie Ward, Ferguson is topless in gold trousers in one frame, then in glossy PVC pants on a paisley sofa in the next. A close-up of the pair, bare-faced and dressed in black, their hair falling across their faces, captures the unpolished essence of the British grunge scene all too well.

Rounding the corner into the next room, visitors encounter the famous Juergen Teller photo of a pink-haired Kate Moss in bed, her hair almost forming hearts. It’s the image Tumblr girls and Kendall Jenner and company tried to recreate circa 2014, and two students circle the photo. There’s more where that came from. Teller’s provocative portrait of Kristen McMenamy, fully nude, staring defiantly into the camera, “Versace” scrawled across her chest with a heart around it—a metaphorical middle finger to the Italian brand after she was dropped in the mid-1990s—is a showstopper. Meanwhile, Tracey Emin’s Is Anal Sex Legal? Is Legal Sex Anal? glows neon pink and reflects in McMenamy’s frame.

Aptly titled “I Can’t Get No Sleep,” the third room dials things up. Ashen-black walls and a scannable Spotify soundtrack bring jungle, U.K. garage, and everything in between to life. “This gives me butterflies,” says a red-haired woman, staring at Vinca Petersen’s Subversive Joy collage. A sea of Polaroids, rave posters, and diary entries fills one wall, documenting her teenage years spent at free raves, partying at Holloway Road’s iconic bar the Rocket, camping out at Glastonbury, and trying to snag a job at her local McDonald’s. You can’t help being drawn to it.

Next to me, a father explains the “cyclical nature” of fashion to his son, all while eyeing Ewan Spencer’s portraits of young Black men in oversize leather coats, snapped mid-dance. Beside it, a large-framed photograph captures a young girl, her braids scraped into a ponytail and fan in hand, cooling off on the dance floor. The whole wall is electric, the energy of the dance floor practically palpable.

Elsewhere, nights at Flesh, Manchester’s progressive queer club night, come alive in images of clubbers with spiked blond hair and England flag tees. Goldie poses with an arm slung around a pixie-haired raver, while South Asian teens take over the decks at Daytimers, the afternoon parties that brought a new generation to the dance floor.

The best room is where art and activism merge. “Body Shock” brings together artists, photographers, and designers using their work to make wider statements about the state of the world. Hamad Butt’s large glass-bulb installation, filled with reactive chemicals, reflects the severity of the AIDS crisis. (He passed away from complications of the disease in 1994.) Alexander McQueen’s intricate designs sit in glass cases, including a silver-rendered rose corset from his Givenchy Spring 2000 collection and a coiled corset made in collaboration with jeweler Shaun Leane. A large plinth showcases an embroidered scarlet-red dress and snakeskin heels, famously worn by Erin O’Connor on the runway in a ring of fire. It’s from his controversial Fall 1998 Joan line, which was inspired by Joan of Arc and religion. Bathed in low light and soundtracked by crows and whistling wind, the room features more head-turning images: Isabella Blow in a bird-wing hat by milliner Philip Treacy, Leigh Bowery in a BDSM bodysuit and gimp mask, plus a woman urinating beside Vauxhall Bridge.

The exhibition is stripped back in the next room, where stark white walls are lined with photographs by Nick Knight, featuring disabled models posing against a plain backdrop. The images originally appeared in the guest-edited 1998 Alexander McQueen issue of Dazed & Confused. In the corner, Devon Aoki appears in a loop of Hussein Chalayan’s “After Words” show at Sadler’s Wells, opposite his ingenious foldable airmail dress. (Buyers could write a letter and post the dress to its recipient!) Given the heaviness of the last room, there’s something calming about Damien Hirst’s display of sharks circling a metal ring, evoking the simplicity and finality of life and death.

A celebration of Black designers lights up the penultimate room. In one photograph, a 20-something Edward Enninful stands outside a semidetached house in West London, dressed in a rich brown triple-breasted suit with trousers cropped at the knee. Three more Black models join him, all sleek and sharply tailored, in a series shot by Jason Evans to challenge perceptions of Britain’s middle-class areas. On a small screen, clips from the late British designer and tailor Joe Casely-Hayford’s runway shows spanning Fall 1991 to Fall 1998 play opposite an open display of sharp tailoring by another pioneer, Ghanaian-British designer Ozwald Boateng. A red mohair suit sits alongside a teal version, showcasing his early work on Savile Row. A silent black-and-white film by Steve McQueen features two Black men tussling naked, challenging conventional notions of Black masculinity. Nearby, a vibrant i-D spread titled “We Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet” features Black models, including Enninful, in striking second-skin sets, leopard print, trousers covered in toys, and bleach-blond hair.

The finale, “The Swing of History,” creeps up on you. Easily the highlight of the room (and perhaps the exhibition) is a commanding plinth displaying three Galliano designs. One is a billowing taffeta gown with crinolines, worn by Kate Moss on the Spring 1994 catwalk after Galliano famously encouraged her backstage to run in the sweeping dress. It sits alongside other Galliano heavy hitters: a 20th-century-style corset with gradient rolls along the sleeves from the Diorient Express collection, and a 1940s tuxedo jacket made from a roll of material.

A retrospective of British fashion without Vivienne Westwood? Impossible. Tartan ensembles ranging from corsets to knee-high socks are on display, along with gillie shoes from the Anglomania collection. Before exiting, I spy Yinka Shonibare’s take on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing and floating hairstyles worn by Black women, displayed in small frames—corkscrew curls, tonged curls, finger waves. It’s a joy to see it all.

While the ’90s are often remembered through a glossy lens—models papped outside parties, inimitable runway shows—“Art & Fashion” brings a sense of humanity to an era so often lauded and pinned to mood boards. Beneath the glamour, the decade was defined by rebellion, important social messages that extended beyond the runway, personality in spades, and nightlife built on connection rather than IG likes. In today’s turbulent fashion landscape, where creative-director appointments and trends seem to shift at breakneck speed, there’s something comforting about looking back at a generation of photographers, artists, and models who carved out their own lanes, using their work to challenge societal norms and stand for something—all while having (well-documented) fun in the process.