Edward Enninful has introduced The 90s: Art and Fashion, a new exhibition at Tate Britain opening today, in his own words. The show brings together more than 200 works across art, photography, film and fashion, curated through Enninful's personal perspective on the decade.
A personal curation driven by looking forward
Enninful, who has never been someone who likes looking back, explained that his approach to curating the exhibition was shaped by his usual interest in what's next. The idea came during lunch with Maria Balshaw, an old friend and former director of Tate, who suggested the 1990s as a theme. Enninful, who became fashion director of i-D in 1991 at age 18, said yes within two seconds, wanting to tell the story through his eyes and look back in order to look forward.
The exhibition was put together with the team at Tate Britain. Enninful stressed it is not a greatest-hits version of the decade, because the 1990s were about far more than the YBAs and Cool Britannia. While Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and others from that wave are included, space was equally given to artists such as Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, Steve McQueen and others making work with the same urgency but without always receiving the same institutional attention.
Political context and cultural collisions
Enninful recalled growing up in nightclubs, as did many of the photographers, designers, artists and editors whose outputs appear in the exhibition and this issue. But he noted it was not all CDs and partying, describing the era as very political. People were living through HIV and Aids and asking who was allowed into certain rooms and who wasn't. As a young black man working in fashion, he understood clearly that many spaces he wanted to enter had not been built with people like him in mind, and a generation of outsiders had to find their way in and start changing those spaces from within.
That context is visible in the work: Corinne Day and Juergen Teller replacing polish with something rawer and more intimate; Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan breaking apart ideas of what fashion could be; Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare confronting questions of race, identity and Britishness; Hamad Butt responding to the Aids crisis. All of this was constantly colliding.
Special issue contributions and exhibition details
Enninful wanted to capture that same feeling in this special issue of The London Standard, with contributions from those who were there with him. Simon Mills looks at the political and social breakthroughs that changed Britain for ever, Paul Flynn remembers what it meant to be gay in the 1990s, and Teller looks back at his pink-haired photograph of Kate Moss. The issue also looks at the now, as Maddy Mussen asks why Gen Z has become so obsessed with New Labour.
Enninful encouraged readers to visit the exhibition at Millbank, noting that many of the people featured were young, working-class or simply people who had to use art as their currency. That, more than nostalgia, is what he wanted the exhibition and this issue to be about. The 90s: Art and Fashion at the Tate runs from October 8, 2026 to February 14, 2027.
