The 90s: Art and Fashion

The 1990s have been recycled so relentlessly that the decade can sometimes feel like an endlessly replenished mood board: slip dresses, skinny brows, Britpop, heroin chic, the Union Jack. Thankfully, Tate Britain’s The 90s: Art and Fashion promises something much more interesting. Curated by Edward Enninful OBE, it treats the decade as an ecosystem in which artists, designers, photographers, magazines and nightclubs fed voraciously off one another. Boundaries between high and low culture were crossed once and again and eventually became gloriously irrelevant.

Enninful became fashion director of i-D at just 18, and his recollections of a London where creativity flourished despite limited money give the exhibition the authority of lived experience. This was a culture before Instagram flattened subcultures into content, when a photograph in i-D or Dazed could alter the way a generation saw beauty almost overnight.

Left: Naomi Campbell models in Vivienne Westwood AW94 “On Liberty”. Photo: Guy Marineau, Vogue © Condé Nast.
Middle: Nick Knight, David Toole (1998), printed 2016. Courtesy of Nick Knight SHOW Studio.
Right: Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (after Fragonard) (2001) © Yinka Shonibare. Tate.

The opening sections return to that anti-glamour. Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and Nigel Shafran helped dismantle the high-production fantasy of 1980s fashion photography, replacing it with rawer, stranger and more intimate imagery. Kate Moss became its most famous face, but Tate wisely widens the frame through Eileen Perrier, Roshini Kempadoo, Barbara Walker and others who complicated the decade’s supposedly new ideas of visibility and representation.

The same porousness runs through the art. Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst sit alongside the club cultures that made British creativity feel less institutional and more nocturnal. Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, assembled from found footage of northern dance floors, remains one of the great documents of that crossover: part anthropology, part elegy, part collective hallucination. Acid house, jungle, hip-hop and queer nightlife appear as the real engines of visual culture.

Left: Sarah Lucas, Chicken Knickers (1997). © Sarah Lucas. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Tate.
Right: Jenny Saville and Glen Lutchford, Close Contact #4 © Jenny Saville and Glen Lutchford. All right reserved, DACS 2026.

Crucially, Tate resists presenting Cool Britannia as an uncomplicated victory lap. Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry, made in tribute to Doreen Lawrence and her murdered son Stephen, and Steve McQueen’s Bear expose a Britain in which race, masculinity and belonging were being contested as fiercely as style. The decade’s optimism had shadows: AIDS, recession, class division and the exclusions hidden behind the national swagger.

Fashion, meanwhile, becomes both show and argument. Alexander McQueen mined British history for violence and trauma; Hussein Chalayan treated clothes almost as speculative design; Ozwald Boateng and Joe Casely-Hayford expanded the image of British menswear. By the time Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde Grid turns towards the millennium, exhilaration has acquired a trace of unease.

That may be the exhibition’s smartest proposition. The ’90s did not simply look cool. They changed who was allowed to make culture, where it could happen, and what could count as art. Three decades later, we are still living inside the consequences.

The 90s: Art and Fashion
8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
Tate Britain, London
More information and tickets, HERE.

Author: Lina Ress

Lead image (cropped from the original due to formatting restrictions: Eddie Otchere, Metalheadz Sunday Sessions in the Blue Note, Hoxton Square (1995-1996). © Eddie Otchere.

Other exhibitions this autumn recommended by I-M Inquisitive Minds include Amar Kanwar: Into the Darkness, at Serpentine North, London; Slow Dance, at MCA Chicago; and Fernando Botero: In Praise of an Amplified World, at Opera Gallery, London.