Few decades are as easy to mythologise as the British 1990s. “Cool Britannia”, the Young British Artists, rave culture, Kate Moss and Alexander McQueen have long since hardened into a set of familiar images. The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opened at Tate Britain on 8 October 2026, sets itself a harder task than nostalgia: to treat that decade as a moment when the borders between gallery, magazine, club and catwalk genuinely dissolved. Tate describes it as the first exhibition to explore the art, photography and fashion of the 1990s together.
A decade seen through a fashion editor’s eye
The most consequential decision behind the show is its curator. Rather than entrusting the narrative only to its own art historians, Tate invited Edward Enninful OBE, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, to lead it, working with Tate Britain’s Contemporary British Art team (Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore and Celeste McEvoy) and the gallery’s director, Alex Farquharson. According to Tate, the exhibition draws directly on Enninful’s own experience of the decade. The result is a selection of more than 100 photographs, paintings, sculptures and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers, in which fashion images are not illustrations of an era but works in their own right.
That is a real shift of emphasis for a national collection of British art. It places photographers such as Corinne Day, Nigel Shafran and Juergen Teller, whose pictures for i-D and Dazed and Confused defined a raw “anti-fashion” look, in the same conversation as Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Gillian Wearing. The common denominator, the exhibition argues, was a taste for imperfection, realness and a do-it-yourself attitude that followed the economic gloom of the 1980s.
From the dancefloor to the formaldehyde tank
The show’s structure moves between two poles. On one side is the street and the club: Mark Leckey’s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, photographs of acid house by Dave Swindells, Peter J Walsh and Tony Davis, the jungle, hip-hop and drum and bass scenes recorded by Normski, Eddie Otchere and Ewen Spencer, and queer club nights photographed by Poulomi Desai, Stuart Linden Rhodes and Jon Shard. On the other is the cool, conceptual end of the decade: the gothic interest in decay in Helen Chadwick, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Cathy de Monchaux; Hamad Butt’s response to the AIDS crisis; the pared-back forms of Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume and Cerith Wyn Evans; and Damien Hirst’s fabricated formaldehyde works, which Tate presents as “the antithesis to low-fi grunge”.
Between the two stand the designers who blurred art and fashion most spectacularly: Alexander McQueen’s theatrical, often unsettling presentations and Hussein Chalayan’s object-inspired clothing, alongside the starker imagery of Nick Knight, David Sims and Craig McDean and Wolfgang Tillmans’s Concorde Grid (1997), with its mix of millennial optimism and anxiety.
The other side of Cool Britannia
The exhibition’s most important move is to complicate the national-branding version of the decade. It gives space to artists who pointed at those left out of the Cool Britannia story: Steve McQueen’s first major film, Bear (1993); Chris Ofili’s Turner Prize-winning painting No Woman, No Cry (1998), a tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence; and Keith Piper’s video on sport and national identity. Black British fashion is foregrounded through Ozwald Boateng’s tailoring, runway footage of Joe Casely-Hayford, photography by Koto Bolofo and the street-style collaboration of Jason Evans and Simon Foxton. The final room turns to Yinka Shonibare, Maud Sulter, Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano, who borrowed from history to question class, representation and national mythology.
Honargardi’s reading: re-evaluation, with caveats
The strength of the project is its premise that a fashion photograph by Corinne Day and a sculpture by Rachel Whiteread belong to one cultural ecosystem. Its risk lies in the same place. The exhibition is supported by the fashion house McQueen, its media partner is Dazed, and it is curated by one of fashion’s most powerful editors. None of this invalidates the show, but it means visitors are seeing the decade partly through the institutions that shaped its image in the first place. Whether the exhibition becomes a genuine re-evaluation of the 1990s, as Tate intends, or a polished celebration of a style that the fashion industry still profits from, is the question worth carrying through its rooms. The decision to centre artists excluded from the official narrative suggests the curators are aware of that tension.
Practical information
The 90s: Art and Fashion, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027, daily 10.00–18.00. Tickets £22 (concessions £20; £5 for Tate Collective members aged 16–25; free for Tate Members). Tate’s visitor guidance notes strong language, references to drug use, a graphic representation of violent death, and one room with flashing lights.
Sources
- Tate Britain: The 90s: Art and Fashion (official exhibition page)
- Tate press release, 6 October 2026
This article was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed by the Honargardi editorial team.