Pro or con, visitors are sure to have strong opinions about “Fashion in the Nineties,” the new exhibition at the Museum at FIT. The decade that gave us grunge and glamour has been cultified on Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram to the point where everyone seems to have their own essential playlist. “People will come in and look at any of these sections and say, I wouldn’t have included that, but I would’ve included this Calvin Klein dress, and that’s really fun,” curator Colleen Hill says. “And I hope people share that with me.”
Visitors should not expect a retrospective, per se. The starting point for the exhibition are objects in the museum’s holdings (rounded out with some loans) which Hill has organized within a framework informed by journalism and analysis from around that time. Both the show and the catalog are organized into two main themes—reinvention and restlessness—each of which contains four sub-trends. The first gallery sets the groundwork for the explosion of the industry in the 1990s, touching on supermodels, fashion television and film, and the theatricalization of shows that were viewed by a bigger and more general audience than had ever been before. (Tune into the podcast In Vogue: The 1990s for more on these themes.)
Leading the trends Hill assigns to the Reinvention section is minimalism, which was ostensibly a reaction to 1980s opulence, though in short time the “aesthetic subtly had become a newfound expression of affluence,” she writes. Then comes grunge, which continues to influence the way we dress despite being “a blip” (Hill’s words) in the industry. “It was something that of course came from the streets and moved its way into high fashion, and then kind of went back into everyday dress,” she says, “but it was something that everyone could afford. Everyone could buy into it, everyone could make a grunge look, and it did not have to be the several thousand dollars Perry Ellis [by Marc Jacobs] version.” (There’s one of those on view, as well as a look from Anna Sui’s grunge show.)
Just as grunge was instrumental in breaking with past ideals of beauty, so designers like Rei Kawakubo, Hussein Chalayan, and Martin Margiela were exposing the so-called bones of clothing with garments that were themselves distorted or which distorted the body—see especially: Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection of spring 1997. At the same time that these independent designers were flourishing, the luxury industry was being consolidated as exciting new talents like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen made over French heritage houses, often with shock and awe tactics.
It wouldn’t be correct to say it was out with the old and in with the new, however, because the work of these designers—and many others—was often concerned with plundering the past. A single collection might reference more than one decade. Some of that manic referencing certainly had to do with the 1990s being “the end of a decade, the end of a century, the end of a millennium,” Hill notes. Designers were facing an unknown future. At the time Y2K was a technological threat, not an aesthetic.
Restlessness is the second main theme of the exhibition, within which Hill explores four sub topics: Retro Revivals, Technology, Environmentalism and Reuse, and the Global Wardrobe. It’s too much to say that futuristic designs countered designers’ exploration of past fashions. McQueen’s circuit board pieces for Givenchy and Jean Paul Gaultier’s Mad Max–like bodysuits were largely symbolic, especially in contrast to the change that digital communications and the burgeoning internet would have on fashion. Truth be told we’ve yet to see a seamless integration of technology and design, which is why the inclusion of a 1996 dress, a collaboration between Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please line and the artist Yasumasa Morimura, especially welcome. Miyake and Morimura used for that dress sophisticated pleating and printing techniques.
From the vantage point of 2022, it’s possible to look back at some 1990s fashions by Franco Moschino, Margiela, and Xuly-Bët’s Lamine Badian Kouyaté and understand them to be sustainable, even if they weren’t labeled that way at the time. “Designers weren’t talking about their work and its reuse in those terms,” Hill says. It was “more about thinking about the wastefulness of the fashion industry; we now think about that in terms of sustainability, but it was a different kind of idea then.”
Ideas about what is cultural appreciation versus appropriation have also changed since the 1990s when the idea of the global citizen flourished. If travel expanded access and interest in other (sub) cultures in the 1920s and 1960s, media did so in the 1990s, an era in which travel-themed collections proliferated. “I felt it was really important [to address this theme] because it was a big part of 1990s fashion culture,” Hill says. “To not address it felt more problematic than trying to explain it a little bit—and not explain it away or make excuses.”
Fashion isn’t always pretty, that’s for sure. Part of the appeal of the come-as-you-are 1990s is that it made room for imperfection and a sense of undoneness. The Y2K fad, Hill says, “doesn’t have the soul that ’90s fashion has. Obviously I can’t speak for everyone.” She adds, “But I think one of the things that keeps ’90s fashion so important is that there were many ways that trends within ’90s fashion were made accessible. It’s partly that overlap with popular culture. We feel more familiar with fashion than ever before and more like we’re part of it.”
