“The ’90s: Art and Fashion” at Tate Britain Is a Love Letter to an Era Before Social Media

The ’90s never really ended in fashion: each new generation refuses to let the decade go, whether it’s an obsession with slip dresses or a dedication to archival fashion. Some might say it is the last big disruption in fashion and culture, even if it was now 30 years ago. Either way, it seems like the era has never been as ubiquitous as it is now. This makes it the perfect time for a thrilling new exhibition. “The ’90s: Art and Fashion” at Tate Britain brings together art and fashion photography, couture, and sculpture to showcase a time capsule of culture in the United Kingdom. As curator Helen Little tells ELLE, “This was a time when art, fashion, music, and nightlife collided and exploded. It was a period of extreme buoyancy and hedonism and optimism.” The work of Brits like Juergen Teller, David Sims, Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Vivienne Westwood, and Alexander McQueen is showcased in a way that contrasts the familiar and unfamiliar.

Co-curated by fashion editor Edward Enninful and others, the exhibition opens up with a room that attempts to show what it was like to live in Britain in the early 1990s, just after Margaret Thatcher had resigned when the country was in a period of economic recession. “Artists and designers found a huge amount of joy in a new kind of realness and reality,” says Little. “What we’re trying to do with the show is also to celebrate the challenges and the hopes of the era, as well as that hedonistic story that we’ve become so fond of.”

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Naomi Campbell in Vivienne Westwood AW94 ’On Liberty’. Courtesy Guy Marineau, Vogue, Condé Nast.

Walking through the show, you’ll see the everyday contrasted with the high fashion extremes. Like photographs of teenagers hanging out at local shopping centers by Nigel Shafran. “These young people were completely unaware that they were going to be photographed that day when they got up and did their hair and got dressed,” says Little. “It was all part of a moment of saying, you know, enough with the opulence and the excess and the glamour of the 80s. Let’s turn our camera and celebrate the warmth and the dignity of young people living ordinary lives more authentically.”

The last room of the show features some iconic looks by the trailblazing designer Vivienne Westwood, who in her early days combined Scottish tartan with West African headscarves, reflecting the dichotomy of exactly what was happening in the U.K. at that time. Alexander McQueen is featured in the largest room of the show, with context about the designer’s love of Gothic horror, ideas about the female form, armor, and protection, and the type of raw emotion that he wanted to instill in the people who wore and saw his clothing.

“We were also really interested in how McQueen contributed to a media landscape in the 90s that was really hungry for controversy,” says Little. “The way in which he employed shock tactics to get attention for what he was doing. He was a master at that.” Alongside McQueen, the work of brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman is shown as another example of shock value. “These quite grotesque, violent sculptures caused a huge furor in the art world,” says Little. “But we’ve also extended that phenomenon to think about how these artists and makers, who were so fascinated with pleasure and pain at the height of the AIDS crisis, tell us a much broader story.”

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Juergen Teller, Young Pink Kate, London 1998. Courtesy Juergen Teller.

Tate Britain

Nick Knight, David Toole 1998, printed 2016. Courtesy Nick Knight SHOWStudio.

Another focus of the show is the female artists who made powerful images that deciphered what it meant to be a girl at the time. “We’re really excited and proud that by asking questions about what it meant to be a girl, these artists shadowed quite narrow definitions of beauty at this time,” says Little. “It’s about this sort of reaction and going against the excess and the glamour of the decade before. Think: an intimate portrait of Barbara Walker’s 14-year-old daughter, or Gillian Wearing’s iconic performance Dancing in Peckham, which is a video of the artist dancing completely freely in the middle of a shopping center. Sarah Lucas’s size 7 Dr. Martin boots with razor blades in the toe caps are also there (the artist said she needed them to walk home across London after a late-night party).

Tate Britain

Eddie Otchere, Metalheadz Sunday Sessions in the Blue Note, Hoxton Square 1995-1996. Courtesy Eddie Otchere.

But most of all, the show is a love letter to an analog era before social media. “There seems to be a bit of a sort of zeitgeist at the moment looking back to this period,” says Little. “I think it’s got something to do with it being the last analog age, and the freedoms and the kind of human connections that people who did experience the ’90s, these experiences that were so foundational to every all aspects of life and creativity, and the way in which artists and people generally had a different kind of space to figure out who they wanted to be, and had access to all kinds of experiences and education that we’ve kind of lost.”

“The ’90s: Art and Fashion” is open at Tate Britain through Feb. 14, 2027.