Christy Turlington, Elle Macpherson, Naomi Campell and Claudia Schiffer in 1995. Photo / Getty Images
Christy Turlington, Elle Macpherson, Naomi Campell and Claudia Schiffer in 1995. Photo / Getty Images
For the past couple of years I’ve watched as Gen Z had a field day with my era. Let them flash their taut abs, as they flit between festivals in their Y2K crop tops and low-slung jeans. Slip dresses and slogan tees? Enjoy.
They say if you wore it the first time around, you should give it a wide berth on all subsequent resurrections. Who are they? I mean, I’m happy to oblige with anything low-rise (even if you’ve been diligently doing Pilates for the past two decades, there are more dignified ways to fill your days than flaunting your abs in an attempt to keep up with the 20-somethings).
But cargo pants and bias-cut midi skirts are way too good to be off-limits. Ditto vest tops, which strike a fuss-free note under a blazer.
The 1990s was one of the best fashion decades of the past century. I’m unashamedly partisan here. I hated the 1980s and almost anything was going to be an improvement.
But what an improvement the 1990s proved to be; the first time a panoply of options for all body shapes emerged simultaneously. The 1990s brought a different kind of freedom. Bye bye bling and clunky 1980s power dressing. Suddenly everyone looked 10 years younger, including Princess Diana, once she sloughed off the big, helmet hair and unflattering drop waists.
In floated elegant minimalism and comfortable ease. John Galliano, pre-implosion, was a major emerging talent at the start of the decade, obsessed with the 1930s technique of bias cutting, pioneered by Madeleine Vionnet – slicing across fabric to create languidly elegant clothes.
Martha Graham, the great contemporary American dancer and choreographer who dressed herself and her dancers in dark jersey midis, which cupped the shoulders, was another influence. Comfort and movement were huge factors. The January 1990 cover of British Vogue, which featured Christy, Linda, Naomi, Tatiana and Cindy and is credited for anointing the era of the supermodel, showed them wearing Grahamesque off-the-shoulder stretch tops (check out the 2023 versions at Tove and Toteme).
Diana benefitted from the elegant minimalism and comfortable ease of the era. Photo / Getty Images
Bias-cutting rapidly percolated the mainstream. Ghost, the British label founded in 1984 by Tanya Sarne, moved its shows to New York in 1993 and its washable viscose bias-cut dresses became a defining look of the decade. A feature of bias-cutting is stretch – and bounce back. Great for pregnancy and beyond. These were forever dresses before that concept became a virtue. The Design Museum in London describes the Ghost dress as “one of those quiet revolutions”. It’s still ongoing. While the revamped Ghost does well as a high-street label (worn by the Princess of Wales), original Ghost is highly prized by the cognoscenti. A rayon spaghetti-strapped khaki version is currently on 1st Dibs for £466 ($977).
The hoopla around Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the most infamous star-crossed lovers since Sid and Nancy, meant that grunge dominated MTV. Grunge fashion should have been an oxymoron, given its supposed disdain for the mass consumerism that had been embraced in the 1980s. But Grunge’s hodgepodge, thrift dressing was the third big influence.
The then 29-year-old Marc Jacobs’ spring 1993 show for Perry Ellis, a squeaky clean sportswear American giant, was an expensive play on grunge that most of the press hated at the time. The collection cost him his job, but would earn him a reputation as a major player in the intersection of fashion, counterculture and art and helped shift millions of plaid, lumberjack shirts, clompy boots, oversized sweaters and midis.
None of this would have looked nearly so appealing without the beauty of the supermodels.
The supers gave grunge an edgy glamour and showed us how to dress down to dress up. Jil Sander introduced us to double-face cashmere – unlined coats so soft and streamlined you wanted to sleep in them. Double-face returns this winter in a Uniqlo designer collaboration – watch this space (top notch designer high-street collections have come a long way since those tentative 1990s efforts).
Shalom Harlow modelling at Marc Jacobs’s spring 1993 show for Perry Ellis: an expensive play on grunge. Photo / Getty Images
The fabulously chic Carolyn Bessette Kennedy embodied a new, pared-back polish that’s still admired. Calvin Klein (for whom Bessette Kennedy worked) brought a tactile sense of luxury to minimalism. Sander delivered deceptively simple tailoring and Helmut Lang gave it sharpness, ingenuity and an ethereal, slender androgyny, which only made the models look more feminine.
The supers’ ability to sell clothes meant they were also powerful in reality. Their beauty was more than an adjunct – it shaped fashion. Clothes became simple and unadorned because the models did the rest. US Vogue’s August 1988 shoot of newish names photographed in black and white by Peter Lindbergh, another architect of 1990s aesthetics, featured Linda, Christy and co in white, oversized shirts from Gap – a harbinger of things to come.
Then it began to turn dark. The first person I heard use the words “heroin chic” was President Clinton in 1997, in a speech castigating the fashion industry for glorifying unhealthy images of models. Until then, I don’t think anyone had come across that expression at British Vogue, where I then worked. But he wasn’t wrong. Kate Moss’s charming waif was hijacked by photographers and stylists who pushed skinniness to the extreme. Not for the first time, art, or in this case fashion, was mesmerised by the construct of beautiful young women on a path to destruction.
Other glitches warped the decade’s perceptions. The rise of ladette culture and the explosion of famous-for-being-famous celebrities eventually gave way to reality TV stars and the trash-fest of noughties fashion.
But in between, there were five or six years of lovely, sinuous clothes that offered genuine choice, from slip dresses to trouser suits. Before Botox, fillers and hair extensions went mainstream, natural make-up ruled. Bobbi Brown’s ingenious “nude” make-up reigned supreme. Hairstyles were wash-and-go. Rachel’s layers, Gywneth’s and Linda’s crops, Amber Valletta and Emma Balfour’s pixie cuts.
Balfour returns in a new ad campaign this autumn. The bias-cut skirt has become one of this changeable summer’s de facto staples (Marks & Spencer keep selling out and you can bet not just to under 25s). It’s loved because it looks as good with a vest as with a lightweight jumper and works with trainers (first seen as streetwear in the 1990s) as well as strappy sandals.
Combats are another surprise hit, along with strapless dresses (who can forget Bessette Kennedy’s black one in 1998), as women adapt them to their body and weather, by layering them over vests and under shirts and blazers.
John F. Kennedy Jr. with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in 1998. Photo / Getty Images
Oversized shirts are everywhere, worn as lightweight jackets, layered on top of one another, or as a lightweight suit, with matching trousers. Bucket hats are the millinery of this summer. Dior’s women’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, who began championing them a few seasons back on the catwalk, has them pride of place in Dior’s latest takeover of Harrods. The same then, but some of it honed over the past 30 years. The array of footwear now for instance, is much better than 30 years ago.
Pixie cuts are on the catwalk and on Julia Garner, Michelle Williams, January Jones and Cush Jumbo – same same but slightly different. The Nude Face has returned but now it’s called Latte Make-up and it’s all over TikTok. Guerlain, normally associated with luscious red lips and smoky eyes has launched nude palettes in finely milled powders and sophisticated combinations that are so enhancing to mature skins it would be criminal to leave them to Gen Z.
