PHOTOGRAPHY Courtesy of The Tate
The first thing you see at the entrance of Tate Britain’s 90s: Art & Fashion is Jim Lambie’s ZOBOP (1999), a psychedelic mesh of coloured stripes that turns real life into a Bridget Riley painting on steroids. The second thing you see is a piece of text (not so dissimilar from a traditional Editor’s letter) on the wall attributed to Edward Enninful, industry titan and, more importantly, the much-anticipated exhibition’s guest curator. Amongst other things, it reads: ‘This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a chance to reflect critically on a decade that reshaped the relationship between art and fashion’.
Think critically it does, and in places exceptionally well, dissecting in equal measure ladette culture (made most prominent by the ‘Fuck You’ razor-sharp art of Sam Taylor-Johnson and her YBA sisters Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas) and macabre body horror (Chapman’s Great Deeds Against the Dead! is as ghastly and gutsy as it was in its first appearance in 1994). The Black artists and designers celebrated in the penultimate room, aptly titled Nation’s Finest, are among the show’s most vivacious portrayals of 1990s creativity, and the names speak for themselves: Sonia Boyce, Ozwald Boateng OBE, Steve McQueen, Donald Rodney and Yinka Shonibare.
Where the exhibition thrives most is in its unpacking of ‘Ladette culture’, a term now commonly thrown at women who drink beer and like football. It’s a phrase loaded with heavy aesthetic connotations, many of which match the grunge look and feel the 1990s embodied. Still, as co-curator Jessica Vaughan reminds me, the cultural emergence of the ‘Ladette’ certainly wasn’t skin-deep: “The term actually started with some of the artists in the show,” she says. “Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin have spoken about how they had to almost out-male the men to even earn their place, so I think it was born from having to assert yourself in this very male-dominated world that also wasn’t that safe.”
The proposal is supported by the curatorial team’s decision to open the show with a pair of Chelsea boots on the box plinth. I’m as confused as you are, but once you look more closely, it all adds up. “These aren’t any boots,” Vaughan laughs. “They belong to Sarah Lucas, and they’re quite diminutive. If you look more closely, you’ll see neatly tucked razor blades wedged into the shoes’ welts. To me, and to the all-female co-curatorial team, they speak to how being a woman at the time wasn’t that safe. London was quite a threatening place, and there was little room for femininity. These boots carry strength and vulnerability simultaneously, and for us, they were an unexpected but essential way to open the show.”
No doubt this is an exhibition to behold, if you like fashion. But therein lies the problem. This isn’t the V&A. This is Tate.
Beyond your Ladettes (Jurgen Teller’s Go-Sees are filled with them), there’s also fashion aplenty, seen in the era-defining work of image-makers and Teller contemporaries including Corinne Day, Nick Knight, Nigel Shafran and Ellen von Unwerth, just as the reigning kings and queens of design (John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood) also get a look-in. The last room is pure treasure, displaying the most coveted pieces from Galliano’s SS94 collection. A tiny 90s television in the top right corner plays the runway footage featuring the looks on show. Fashion freaks and fanatics alike will know Kate Moss has recounted Galliano’s backstage direction to her for this Anna Karenina-inspired show in many documentaries; you can almost hear Galliano’s voice echo: “You’re Lolita, and you’re a girl from Croydon. You’ve never been fucked, and you really want it.”
No doubt this is an exhibition to behold, if you like fashion. But therein lies the problem. This isn’t the V&A. This is Tate. Is it an art exhibition? No. Is it about the 90s in all its sumptuous, hedonistic decadence that scaled the UK by and large? Also no. Is it, by all accounts, what Enninful insists it’s not (an exercise in nostalgia)? Yes, yes it is.
Of course, there are some exceptions. Enninful knows it wouldn’t be the 1990s without the YBAs, even if their mention is waif-thin at best (a Tracey Emin neon and Damien Hirst shark feel like box tickers for Enninful rather than meaningful inclusions). Thankfully, the show places meaningful emphasis on Hamad Butt (whom Vaughan describes as an “unsung hero of the movement”), with his Familiars (1992) installation looming large over the exhibit’s central room in grandeur and message.
Made up of three separate sculptures, each one confident, conceptually complex, and as allusive as the next, Familiars is, ironically, unfamiliar in its conceptual approach. Because each sculpture is made up of toxic gas and inks, its potential to kill is almost second to none, and so if broken, you would die and so would I (granted we would have to be in the room). It’s a hauntingly ominous piece of work that exemplifies Butt’s career-long exploration of risk and contagion: a fascination that becomes clear when you learn the artist died just two years later in 1994 from AIDS. “It’s a Tate collection work and the last time it was here was in 1995,” Vaughan tells me. “He was a queer, Asian artist who died of AIDS in 1994, and he has been forgotten, pretty much. Had he lived, he would be one of our best-known artists in this country. Hirst looked up to him, everyone did.”
Thankfully, the show places meaningful emphasis on Hamad Butt (whom Vaughan describes as an “unsung hero of the movement”), with his Familiars (1992) installation looming large over the exhibit’s central room in grandeur and message.
Apart from Butt and a handful of others no longer with us (Corinne Day, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Donald Rodney), the show revolves around creatives who aren’t just alive and kicking but are still making work; their reputations lauded and names revered. Chris Ofili (the artist’s seminal work No Woman, No Cry hangs in the Nation’s Finest section) has another current exhibition at Tate Britain that attendees have to walk past to get to Edward’s 90s shrine; Tracey Emin brought in the 2026 New Year with a solo exhibition at Tate Modern, which only closed shop in August; and Sarah Lucas was given her flowers in the form of a Burberry-sponsored exhibition at Tate Britain that took place this side of the pandemic. The point being, how can we reflect on and engage critically with a decade that ended only a quarter of a century prior and whose figureheads are still very much in the zeitgeist today?
Other errors of judgement are laid bare when you remember that London is just one place in the UK, yet it makes up 95% of the exhibition’s focal point. Where’s Manchester? Blur? Oasis? Glastonbury? Charles Saatchi wasn’t the only financial supporter of 90s creativity. Tony Wilson (Factory Records co-founder and founder of The Haçienda) also helped build the cultural cachet of ‘Cool Britannia’: a phenomenon so briefly mentioned you’d hardly know it even happened. The Haçienda does get a mention, but that isn’t Manchester’s only cultural contribution to the movement. Similar to how Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993) “was spoken about in the Houses of Parliament”, Vaughan notes, yet the artwork of choice representing her is an inside cast of a water bottle.
Other errors of judgement are laid bare when you remember that London is just one place in the UK, yet it makes up 95% of the exhibition’s focal point. Where’s Manchester? Blur? Oasis? Glastonbury? Charles Saatchi wasn’t the only financial supporter of 90s creativity.
As someone born at the tail end of the decade, and therefore was still being bottle-fed milk before I even braved my chance at scoring a fake ID, I cannot share much personal experience of the clubs, culture, and spirit that bled from that now-ubiquitous decade. Still, I do know that the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 2000s also had an extraordinary impact on culture, similar to how those associated with Blitz (Princess Julia, Stephen Jones, DJ Fat Tony) have made an entire career out of talking about the short-lived birthplace of New Romantics. Nostalgia keeps a memory alive for decades.
At the end of the day, this isn’t The 90s, as Tate claims. It’s Edward’s 90s, and that’s fine. But if you’re looking for the explosion of creativity Tate boasts of, you’re more likely to find it on the streets of any major city today than in a white-walled gallery best known for housing the world’s most extensive collection of J.M.W. Turner paintings.
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