One highlight was Gillian Wearing dancing in a Peckham shopping mall
What do we immediately think of when we remember the 90s? Brit Pop, the Oasis v Blur War, Kate Moss making Heroin Chic, the YBAs, and everything else the mainstream media wanted us to believe was the crux of cruciality, but for the exhibition’s curator, Edward Enninful, it was the decade where he swapped his ‘Ghana Must Go’ bag for Gucci and took a few friends along with him, writes Michael Holland.
Enninful, who invented himself as a model in the early days of the decade, and eventually became editor of Vogue, takes his focus from the independent magazines that launched in that era, small concerns working on a shoestring, where anyone who could put a sentence together could be a features writer, and if you had a camera and a photogenic friend, you could be given a three-page spread of them in their going-out clobber.
One bright photographer created his own project of taking shots of girls when they arrived at a shoot and found that this was all it was: no sets, no brands to promote, just themselves posing with their portfolios. They were first-timers or novices, and they looked it, but we see them raw, in their own clothes.
Another snapped young people in a shopping mall, thereby showcasing the real fashions of the day, the street-wear, not the unaffordable clobber that shimmied down the catwalk. It was a reminder that the early-90s brought us the shell suit…
The YBAs get a good showing here: Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin all have work exhibited, art that shouted out against any conformity. There is a room dedicated to night life; photos from clubs up and down the UK. And it wasn’t focussed on the 20,000 people standing in a field gurning on Es and whiz, it was the Bhangra clubs, gay clubs, the clubs that never got a mention in the papers. But all the while, aficionados were documenting that scene. Some of the photos on display have not been seen for 30 years.
The highlights for me were Gillian Wearing dancing in a Peckham shopping mall, a shot of the Spice Girls’ feet so that we get a good look at their footwear, Anish Kapoor’s black holes and magic mirrors, and ‘Abigail Arse over Tit’, the T-shirts created from Abigail Lane’s Bottom Wallpaper, where she got a model to sit on an inkpad chair and then on paper to leave an imprint of her buttocks – ‘An artistic mooning,’ the artist declared.
Downlights? The Body Shock room.
Is The 90s too recent to warrant a major exhibition? It might have been if they had included the still-fresh Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit’s Union Jack bed photo off the cover of Vanity Fair. But one Tate spokeswoman told of Brit Pop and Cool Britannia fizzling out when it was noted how ‘white’ it all was.
Enninful went deeper and darker with this exhibition. We got to see the black tailors, hairdressers, and designers that were breaking through, when the streets created their own look, rather than take over the mainstream.
There are many artists represented here, but none of their best work. Some rooms are better than others; some contain works that were hardly known 30 years ago, and remain as anonymous now, but overall it is worth going to see it for how so much of the black input to the decade’s culture was largely ignored at the time.
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG until 14th February 2027.
Booking and full details: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/the-90s
