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{"id":1487,"date":"2026-10-10T21:23:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T17:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/honargardi.com\/en\/?p=1487"},"modified":"2026-10-10T21:23:37","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T17:53:37","slug":"the-90s-at-tate-britain-edward-enninful-restages-the-decade-that-rewired-british-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/honargardi.com\/en\/the-90s-at-tate-britain-edward-enninful-restages-the-decade-that-rewired-british-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The 90s at Tate Britain: Edward Enninful Restages the Decade That Rewired British Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few decades are as easy to mythologise as the British 1990s. \u201cCool Britannia\u201d, 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

A decade seen through a fashion editor\u2019s eye<\/h2>\n

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\u2019s Contemporary British Art team (Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore and Celeste McEvoy) and the gallery\u2019s director, Alex Farquharson. According to Tate, the exhibition draws directly on Enninful\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and Dazed and Confused<\/em> defined a raw \u201canti-fashion\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

From the dancefloor to the formaldehyde tank<\/h2>\n

The show\u2019s structure moves between two poles. On one side is the street and the club: Mark Leckey\u2019s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore<\/em>, 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\u2019s response to the AIDS crisis; the pared-back forms of Rachel Whiteread, Gary Hume and Cerith Wyn Evans; and Damien Hirst\u2019s fabricated formaldehyde works, which Tate presents as \u201cthe antithesis to low-fi grunge\u201d.<\/p>\n

Between the two stand the designers who blurred art and fashion most spectacularly: Alexander McQueen\u2019s theatrical, often unsettling presentations and Hussein Chalayan\u2019s object-inspired clothing, alongside the starker imagery of Nick Knight, David Sims and Craig McDean and Wolfgang Tillmans\u2019s Concorde Grid<\/em> (1997), with its mix of millennial optimism and anxiety.<\/p>\n

The other side of Cool Britannia<\/h2>\n

The exhibition\u2019s 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\u2019s first major film, Bear<\/em> (1993); Chris Ofili\u2019s Turner Prize-winning painting No Woman, No Cry<\/em> (1998), a tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence; and Keith Piper\u2019s video on sport and national identity. Black British fashion is foregrounded through Ozwald Boateng\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Honargardi\u2019s reading: re-evaluation, with caveats<\/h2>\n

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<\/em>, and it is curated by one of fashion\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Practical information<\/h2>\n

The 90s: Art and Fashion<\/strong>, Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. 8 October 2026 \u2013 14 February 2027, daily 10.00\u201318.00. Tickets \u00a322 (concessions \u00a320; \u00a35 for Tate Collective members aged 16\u201325; free for Tate Members). Tate\u2019s visitor guidance notes strong language, references to drug use, a graphic representation of violent death, and one room with flashing lights.<\/p>\n

Sources<\/h2>\n