The 90s: Art and Fashion — Tate Britain
Curated by Edward Enninful, this is the exhibition that finally asks who the 90s actually belonged to, and who got left out.
By Isabella Pettitt
T
he 90s have spent the better part of the decade being aestheticised, reduced to Kate Moss and the visual shorthand of grunge. But the Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition 'The 90s: Art and Fashion' arrives as a corrective, an eye opener.
Opening on the 8th of October 2026 and running until the 14th of February 2027, it is the first major institutional attempt to map the decade's creative output across art, photography and fashion all together.
The exhibition is curated by Edward Enninful OBE; having lived through the decade he's now revisiting, he joined i-D magazine as its youngest fashion editor at just 18. Because he helped shape the era's style as it happened, the exhibition reflects a true insider's perspective, instead of leaning on the typical "Cool Britannia" clichés, the show highlights the stories and details that the mainstream narrative often overlooked.
Featuring nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers and over 100 works, the scope is deliberately very wide. The show opens with the anti-fashion impulse, photography by Corinne Day, Juergen Teller and Nigel Shafran for i-D and Dazed. From there it moves swiftly through club culture, acid house, jungle and drum and bass, capturing the decade's nightlife through photographers including Normski, Eddie Otchere and Ewen Spencer. The AIDS crisis is present through the work of Hamad Butt. Steve McQueen's first major film Bear sits alongside Chris Ofili's Turner Prize-winning No Woman, No Cry, a tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence.
The fashion dimension is equally considered. Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan are here, as expected, but so are Ozwald Boateng and Joe Casely-Hayford, whose contributions to British fashion history have rarely received the institutional recognition they deserve. Black British designers and artists are woven throughout rather than siloed into a single diversity gesture, which is a meaningful curatorial decision.
The exhibition closes with Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano and Yinka Shonibare, artists and designers who, at the decade's end, were already interrogating its mythologies as they were being formed.
Whether the show succeeds will depend on how well it holds the tension between celebration and critique. The 90s were extremely transformative, and they were also uneven, exclusionary and frequently contradictory. Enninful, who has spent his career navigating exactly those contradictions, may be the right person to make that case.
The 90s: Art and Fashion opens at Tate Britain, Millbank, London on 8 October 2026. Tickets available at tate.org.uk. Ages 16-25 can attend for £5 through Tate Collective.
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