It's back to the 90s – again – for Tate Britain's upcoming exhibition

To update the well-worn adage: if you can remember the ’90s, you weren’t really there.

Well, actually, if you can, you still might have been, even if you did at the time go full Fool/Cool Britannia and fried your braincells. You can even remember them if you were born this side of Y2K. Because a quarter-century on from the decade emphatically ending, we’re positively stewing in nostalgia for The Last Great Cultural Epoch (© every newspaper/magazine/platform).

For much of last year, London’s National Portrait Gallery hosted a certifiably blockbuster exhibition about The Face. The 1980-born style magazine reached its zenith, commercially at least, around the time of its 1995 Robbie Williams’ cover, those defining images of the incipient imperial phase of the erstwhile “fat dancer” shot by Norman Watson.

More recently: Love Story only launched in February, but Ryan Murphy’s telenovela about the Peak ’90s New York romance between JFK Jr and his fashionista belle Carolyn Bessette Kennedy – which couldn’t be glossier if it was sponsored by Timotei – is already the most streamed drama in the platform’s six-and-a-half-year history.

Meanwhile you may have noticed that, a few heady months ago, that ur-’90s band, Oasis, got back together for a tour. The world collectively lost its mind and Gen Z turned itself inside out to rock a bucket hat.

Now, because nostalgia is very much what it used to be, comes The 90s: Art and Fashion. Tate Britain’s upcoming exhibition is, according to Alex Farquharson, the London institution’s Director, an exploration of a “dynamic… exciting time [of] social mobility and something so many of us crave: life lived in person without digital distraction.

“I think back to a decade bursting with energy and possibilities,” he continued this morning (Monday 27^th April) as he unveiled the exhibition – running from October 2026 to February 2027 – over caramelised banana pancakes in Soho. “When a new generation of young creatives dismantled old hierarchies without waiting to be invited.”

The exhibition will feature, according to Dominique Heyse-Moore, the Tate’s Senior Curator, Contemporary British Art, more than 70 works. Those include photography by Corinne Day: England’s Dreaming, her (cough) “heroin chic” image of Rosemary Ferguson in Day’s grimy Soho flat, which appeared in the August 1993 edition of The Face. And by Juergen Teller: his 1998 “Young Pink Kate” image of Kate Moss, used as the exhibition’s flagship image. The vitality of the era’s club culture is captured in forever-evocative images and films from assiduous youth culture chroniclers Ewen Spencer, Dave Swindells and, primus inter pares, Mark Leckey with his 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

Then, leaning more directly into that “Art and Fashion” suffix, the exhibition is an Avengers Assemble of ’90s trailblazers and firestarters: Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst and more. There are paintings, photography and films by Jenny Saville, Gillian Wearing and Sarah Lucas. Tracey Emin, currently rightly valorised by Tate Modern in her own 1990s-channelling exhibition A Second Life, of course features, via her 1998 neon piece: “Is legal sex anal? Is anal sex legal?” To which the answer is: only if we turn the other cheek.

Leading from the front in the exhibition is its curator Edward Enninful, who approached Tate Britain with the idea. As the decade dawned, he was an 18-year-old Ghanaian from Ladbroke Grove, the youngest ever fashion editor of an international publication, at i-D. As it faded, he had become one of the biggest voices in fashion and media in the world, on the way to becoming an OBE and the first Black person to serve as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue.

As Farquharson put it, Enninful was “at the centre of shaping the most influential and enduring visuals of the ’90s”.

All of which was launched, naturellement, at the decade’s ground zero playground: The Groucho Club on Soho’s Dean Street. “Welcome to my favourite haunt of the ’90s!” said Enninful in his opening remarks. “Have to be honest, I've never seen Groucho's in the daytime! It's a first.”

In his memory, the beginning of the decade “was a moment of transition. Not just personally, but culturally. London at the time wasn't the polished global capital it is today. It was raw, unstable and full of possibility. There was a sense that something was shifting, even if we didn't yet have the language for it.

“What defined that period, for me was not a single movement but an energy,” he continued. “A refusal of hierarchy and a belief that new voices could and should be heard across art, fashion, music and image-making. People were working in close proximity, moving between the same spaces, the same conversations, the same ideas.”

That, of course, wasn’t just a day-job for desk-jockeys. For Enninful and his coworkers at i-D, or for the team at Jefferson Hack and Rankin’s Dazed & Confused, the upstart style mag that launched in the white-heat of that time, this was a 24/7 commitment. Or, even, a 25/8 one. As Enniful said: “A morning shoot with Nick Knight and Kate Moss might dissolve into a night in Soho. Clubs were not just places to go out, but spaces where ideas were formed, images were tested and identities were performed. The boundaries between disciplines, and between private and public, were collapsing in real time.”

Full disclosure: I’m writing this in full ’90s-meets-’20s uniform, a new, limited-edition T-shirt designed by Junya Watanabe that bears a photograph of Blur, shot by Andrea Giacobbe for the September 1995 edition of The Face. I couldn’t be more nostalgic for other times/worlds if I was Doctor Who.

Fuller disclosure: as an editor at The Face in the ’90s I was one of that new generation of young creatives dismantling old hierarchies without waiting to be invited. Not that it felt anything remotely like that at the time. As one of my old mag colleagues, also in attendance this morning, put it (and I’m paraphrasing): “We were just goons having a laugh, going out a lot, making a magazine. We didn’t feel like any kind of cool set.”

Nonetheless, when The ’90s: Art and Fashion opens this autumn it will, undoubtedly, be grandstanding room-only for old ’90s lags like me, wanging on about the good old days. But Enniful promises something more, too.

“This exhibition is not about nostalgia,” he insisted. “It's about understanding a moment that continues to shape how we think, how we create, how we see. The 1990s established conditions that are still with us: the merging of high and low culture, the politicisation of fashion and image, and the emergence of diversity as a creative force.

“And perhaps most importantly,” Enninful – who now runs EE72, a “global media and entertainment company” – continued, “it reminds us the questions we were asking then remain urgent now. Questions of visibility, access and who gets to be seen. So, this exhibition is an invitation not to look back, but to look again. To reconsider that decade, not as a closed chapter, but as something still unfolding.”

Nostalgia, though, may have its limits. Having closed in 2004, The Face relaunched in 2019, and I went back as a consultant editor. It closed again last month, its collab between ’90s-minted swagger with right-now vibrancy no match for a collapsed commercial/advertising market. We had a good run, though. Although not as good a run as the ’90s, the decade that still isn’t dead.

The 90s: Art and Fashion, 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027. Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

Open daily 10.00–18.00. Tickets available at tate.org.uk and +44(0)20 7887 8888