Tate Britain is recapturing the decade that remade British culture this autumn, with a major new exhibition examining the art, fashion and photography of the 1990s through the eyes of one of the people who lived it most vividly.
The 90s: Art and Fashion, curated by Edward Enninful OBE, brings together over 100 works spanning photography, painting, sculpture and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers.
It is the first exhibition to spotlight the full scope of the decade, treating the 1990s not as a single movement but as a collision of energies: grunge and glamour, DIY and concept, Cool Britannia and the many communities woven into the spirit of the era.
Alexander McQueen, AW 1998 Guy Marineau, Vogue, © Condé Nast
The exhibition is shaped by Enninful’s personal experience of a decade in which the traditional hierarchies separating high art, fashion, music and photography began visibly dissolving.
Publications like i-D and Dazed and Confused, photographers like Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and Nigel Shafran, and a generation of artists who emerged from the 1988 Freeze show collectively rewrote what British creativity could look like and who it could include.
The show opens with that DIY spirit, charting the emergence of an anti-fashion aesthetic rooted in realness and imperfection, before moving through the decade’s subcultures: acid house, jungle, drum and bass, hip-hop, queer club nights and rave culture, all documented by photographers who were present and paying attention.
Nick Knight,
David Toole
1998, printed 2016. Image courtesy of Nick Knight SHOW Studio
Mark Leckey’s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, images from the Haçienda in Manchester and Bagley’s in London, and street photography by Normski and Eddie Otchere build a picture of a country whose cultural life was being shaped as much on dancefloors as in galleries.
The Young British Artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread and Steve McQueen are poignantly presented alongside fashion designers who blurred the line between runway and artwork: Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood.
Yinka Shonibare,
The Swing (after Fragonard)
2001 © Yinka Shonibare. Tate
The exhibition is explicit that Cool Britannia had a narrower frame than its mythology suggests, and devotes significant space to artists including McQueen, Ofili and Yinka Shonibare whose work addressed race, identity and representation at a moment when those conversations were largely absent from the mainstream cultural narrative.
The exhibition closes with artists and designers who, as the millennium approached, turned to interrogate Britain’s history as much as celebrate its present. Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde Grid from 1997 captures the double feeling of the era well: optimism and anxiety balanced on the edge of a new century.
The 90s: Art and Fashion is supported by McQueen. With additional support from The 90s Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons, Tate Members and Tate Americas Foundation.
Header: Eddie Otchere,Metalheadz Sunday Sessions in the Blue Note, Hoxton Square1995-1996 © Eddie Otchere
