What Can the ’90s Tell Us About Today? Tate Britain Isn’t Sure
Observer ·
“The 90s: Art and Fashion” traces Britain’s shift from glossy glamour to raw, irreverent self-expression through works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tracey Emin, Stella McCartney, Ozwald Boateng and many others. Curator Edward Enninful’s selection is, in places, thrilling, but the exhibition's overall impact is undercut by a curiously limited view of the era.
As someone who avidly follows the Instagram handle @90sgirlfriends and feels Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless is canon, “The 90s: Art and Fashion” at Tate Britain was an elder millennial phantasmagoria I was ready to wholeheartedly embrace. The London museum has organized what it calls “the first exhibition to explore the art, photography and fashion of the 1990s” featuring the work of nearly 70 creatives. The selection from within this generational creative class was made by editor and stylist Edward Enninful, tasked with curating a sampling of Britain’s cultural identity.
The opening room situates the visitor in a post-Thatcher world (she resigned as prime minister in 1990) defined by recession and upended taboos about sexuality. Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph Suzanne & Lutz, white dress, army skirt from 1993—with Tillmans’ signature clipped corners—inaugurates the insouciance and androgyny of the era. Exploring an anarchic spirit in a pre-digital world, print publications like i-D, Dazed & Confused and The Face defined coolness and counterculture. (The latter got its own exhibition in “ The Face Magazine: Culture Shift ” in 2025 at the National Portrait Gallery—the irony being the publication shuttered in spring 2026 after being resuscitated in 2019.)
“Fashion magazines had been selling sex and glamour for far too long,” photographer Corinne Day said of the late ’80s supermodel era. Her C-print of Kate Moss in 1993—standing in lace-trimmed undies, a thin gold cross around her neck, wearing a pink tank matching her blush—is about as pared back as the 1998 Juergen Teller image that fronts the exhibition poster ( Young Pink Kate, London ). One of Day’s magazine spreads, from 1993, features a model untouched by a hair or makeup team shot in her own flat, reflecting a time of spontaneity rather than overstyling. Nearby, Eileen Perrier’s 1998 series on the Afro Hair and Beauty Show highlights Black youth culture and style in a way that (models Naomi Campbell and Alek Wek aside) went mostly underrepresented. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s self-portrait, standing frontally to camera with unbuttoned jeans scrunched at her platformed feet, includes a T-shirt declaring FUCK SUCK SPANK WANK—a flippancy that speaks to the brashness of the era.
“ The 90s: Art and Fashion “ Artists: Various Venue: Tate Britain Address: Millbank, London SW1P 4RG Through: February 14, 2027
The next room opens under a pendulous mint Stella McCartney silk satin camisole from her 1995 graduate show at Central Saint Martins, floating aloft. Below it is an Ellen von Unwerth photo from 1994 of Naomi Campbell seated on a toilet, shaving her legs. (Von Unwerth is proof that time changes people: this year, the German photographer shot the black-and-white promotional posters and campaign imagery for the Amazon documentary Melania .) The transfigured body is further showcased by butt-imprint wallpaper (“a kind of artistic mooning” per Abigail Lane , who created it in 1992-7) and the Jenny Saville / Glen Luchford collaborative photo (1995-6) of Saville’s naked body against plexiglass, contorting the folds of her skin and limbs. Placed high on the wall with a lilac glow, Tracey Emin ’s 1998 neon cheekily queries: “Is anal sex legal” / “Is legal sex anal.”
A room further in explores hedonistic nightlife, from clubs playing acid house to the makeshift party scene that unfolded covertly after 1994’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act banned unofficial gatherings. There are revelers in fields and warehouses, enjoying roving raves in a deluge of cigarettes, flyers, caravans, speakers. But the scenes that are most interesting are the ones that were niche at the time, like Jon Shard ’s 1993-5 photos of Manchester’s Flesh, a queer event on the last Wednesday of every month, or Poulomi Desai ’s shots from 1990-4 at the Shakti South Asian LGBTQ+ meetings and Bhangra disco (photos were mostly disallowed, because people were not out beyond the confines of the party). There was even an “afternoon club” for British Asian teenagers not allowed out at night, photographed by Tim Smith in 1990. The sense of unsanctioned entertainment speaks to the welcome overturning of conventional milieux.
These snapshots are followed by dramatic Alexander McQueen silhouettes, like a 1997 calfskin jacket with impala horns or an armor-like corset made for Givenchy in 2000 in resin and silver-plated metal. “I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” McQueen pronounced. Photographer Sophy Rickett conveys a similar feeling of incitement: the black-and-white photograph Vauxhall Bridge is from her 1995 series “Pissing Women” of women urinating upright and in public places, gleefully, like men.
Then there’s a pivot to minimalism and androgyny, illustrated by stark David Sims portraits against studio backdrops of close-cropped models. Hussein Chalayan is in a category of his own with his coffee table-cum-table skirt in mahogany wood (2000), created with furniture designer Paul Topen . The disassembled furniture becomes a wearable garment, doubling as a symbolic reference to the displacement he experienced from his Cypriot origins. Nearby, his brilliant Airmail dress in Tyvek (a tear-proof material that resembles paper) is framed, but the garment was sold folded flat inside an envelope. In small lettering, the dress reads: “both sides can be written on / biro, felt tip, marker.” Across the room, Damien Hirst ’s Harmless … Two Similar Swimming Forms in Endless Motion (Broken) from 1993 suspends two sharks in formaldehyde on a circular metal frame. The YBAs were splashy in ’90s Britain, but they’re a mere sprinkling in the show (in addition to the aforementioned Emin, there’s a Rachel Whiteread cast-plaster sculpture, a Chris Ofili work and a Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture based on a Goya etching).
The next gallery is dedicated to “Black excellence,” with Jason Evans ’ West London portraits of Black men in upper-class stylings offering a “new vision of Britain” in which white wealthy stereotypes are revamped. Ozwald Boateng , the first Black tailor to open a boutique on Savile Row in 1995, infused classical British tailoring with a penchant for color that reflects his Ghanaian origins (here shown via two mohair single-breasted suit jackets in red and teal).
The final room ends with Britain’s past refracted to question diversity, positioning”as a moment poised between past and future,” but seems only to look backwards, remaining totally disconnected from our present moment. There are silhouettes from both Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano (who comes with a caption stating “his later career has been profoundly affected by his personal conduct”)—designers who borrowed across history and cultures, remixing conceptions of style and class. Yinka Shonibare also drew from European art history in his 2001 installation The Swing (after Fragonard) , which places a costumed mannequin on a swing surrounded by artificial foliage à la Jean-Honoré Fragonard (the 18th-century painting hangs some 5 kilometers away at the Wallace Collection). Here, a headless figure sports wax fabric, nodding to the colonial textile channels between Indonesia, the Netherlands, the U.K. and West Africa. The accompanying caption points out that “aristocratic leisure and luxury was made possible by imperial wealth.”
The abrupt conclusion is especially puzzling—even addressing the ’90s revival among Gen Z could have bridged a discussion of how the decade is perceived in the present—and the exhibition overall feels scattershot, without much to say about what the ’90s presaged for our world. It is admirable for gathering BIPOC players who did not get as much visibility at the time, but the perspective on the era feels less encompassing than one would have hoped. Mounting an exhibition that includes fashion but not cinema or music really misses out on taking the temperature of the era—if you’re going pluridisciplinary, go pluridisciplinary! How can you talk about the ’90s without Pulp Fiction , The Matrix , Paris Is Burning , Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me ? Or, if those are too American—despite their international reach—what about Trainspotting (1996) by Danny Boyle or Orlando (1992) by Sally Potter ? Moreover, who talks about 1990s Britain without mention of Blur, Oasis and the Spice Girls? (There are rotating music videos in the hallway, but these are at best a footnote.) It just feels incomplete.