Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me

Cheap, accessible and seemingly ephemeral, at least when they were originally published, my collection of magazines is something I am reluctant to offload. Since purchasing my first copy of The Face in September 1998, I have spent 25 years lugging my growing archive from student accommodation, to first flat, to first house and now, potentially, first storage unit.

Confronted by the dilemma of what to keep each time I choose to relocate, I’m reminded that certain issues have taken on a personal significance. I still recall my feelings of intoxicated ignorance as I flicked through a copy of i-D purchased from the art supplies shop at Loughborough College as a teenager. Staring at the monochrome portrait of American singer Aaliyah on the cover, I was curious: what was this wide world outside of my small hometown in the East Midlands? Ever since then, magazines covering fashion, style, music, art, identity and social debates have been my entry point into culture.

The 1990s was a particularly fertile decade for independent magazine publishing in Europe. London-based titles such as The Face and i-D, already established for several years, and Dazed and Confused, launched in 1991, became popular platforms for experimental photography, bold editorial concepts and independent voices that challenged what fashion and self-expression could be. These publications, along with the likes of Self Service (launched in Paris in 1995), Purple (also based in Paris and first published in 1992) and DutcH (founded in Amsterdam in 1994), fostered the careers of influential photographers, stylists, designers, art directors, hair and make-up artists, casting directors, models, agents and producers who would go on to transform the global fashion industry.

The distinction between the worlds of art and fashion was blurred in the 1990s, with both recognising the benefits of mutual association – art had credibility and reverence, while fashion had commerce and a broader audience. This creative overlap was perhaps best exemplified in the pages of Vogue Hommes International Mode, a relatively niche menswear title in the Condé Nast publishing portfolio. For six issues between 1997 and 2000, its creative director was Phil Bicker. At the time, Bicker was also art director of Creative Camera, a periodical dedicated to fine art and documentary photography, and with his acute understanding of the medium, he experimented by commissioning photographers who would not usually have worked in in this context to shoot fashion stories. Editorials from the period by Larry Sultan, Malerie Marder and Tierney Gearon set a blueprint for brands collaborating with photographers who bring their cultural capital to campaigns and projects.

The idea that magazines are significant cultural artefacts that play a vital role in shaping, communicating and documenting taste, aspiration and identity is a view that is increasingly being shared by major cultural institutions such as Tate, where magazines, and work first published in magazines, feature heavily in the exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion. Among the art on display, visitors to the show at Tate Britain will encounter many framed photographic prints that originate from editorial projects that have come to define some of the key aesthetic and cultural trends of the decade.

Nigel Shafran’s black and white portraits of young people outside Ilford Shopping Centre, for example, have become a key reference for early-1990s street style. Originally commissioned not for a gallery wall, but for a fashion story styled by the late Melanie Ward titled ‘Teenage Precinct Shoppers’, they were first published in the January 1991 issue of i-D. ‘Strictly’, meanwhile, is a celebrated project created by photographer Jason Evans and stylist Simon Foxton. Published in the July 1991 issue of i-D, it consists of portraits of young Black men stood wearing, as Foxton has described, ‘slightly dandyish clothing in very suburban settings’. Explaining their intentions, Evans has said that ‘the work was imagined as a riposte to racist stereotypes in our media’. The photography has transcended the original magazine commission, and in 2004 a set of prints became the first fashion photographs to be acquired for Tate’s collection

One question that arise s when exhibiting fashion photography is how to present or acknowledge its original context. This is easily missed in today’ s online culture, where we are used to images forever being repurpose d and recontextualised, often without vital information attached to them. Returning to the printed source , however, ca n yield much about the conditions under which these pictures were mad e and help to shed light on why certain images have come to hold an important place in our cultural imagination.

Take ‘Under-exposure’ , an intended lingerie fashion shoot photographed by Corinne Day for British Vogue that took place in Kate Moss’s own flat in West London. Published in the magazine’s June 1993 issue, the resulting pictures of a 19-year-old Moss have become defining images from the first half of the decade. But the truly radical nature of Day’s work becomes even clearer when viewed beside its surrounding contents. These include luxury fashion stories titled ‘Long hot summer evenings’ – focusing on breezy evening wear shot against a backdrop of resort swimming pools and white sandy beaches – and ‘Going for a sarong’ , which showcases different ways of wearing said garment in a series of sun-kissed holiday scenes.

Counter these with Day’s portrait of a then little-known Moss posing on her unmade bed next to a cheap television. It feels like it has in filtrated another world. The story’s tagline – ‘What to wear beneath effort-free clothes? ’ – signals the nonchalant rejection of strict fashion codes that was core to the grunge subculture that had originated in late-1980s Seattle and was, by the early 1990s, being co-opted by luxury fashion – something to which Day’s raw, documentary-style photographs made a key contribution. She had already published celebrated work featuring Moss in ‘The 3rd Summer of Love’ in the July 1990 issue of The Face, and her equally iconic editorial, ‘England’s Dreaming’, also styled by Melanie Ward and shot with model Rosemary Ferguson in the photographer’s own flat on Brewer Street in London’s Soho, was published in The Face in the summer of 1993. As a woman photographer in an industry largely dominated by men, Day rejected polished glamour in favour of natural realism. Her candid and intimate portraits of the models and muses she photographed helped to define the visual language of British style and continue to exert a profound influence on photography and visual culture.

The 1990s are often portrayed as a homogenous decade defined by the optimism of New Labour, Cool Britannia and rapid technological change. However, this overlooks the diversity and complexity of the period. People’ s experiences of the decade varied significantly across countries, regions and communities, shaped by issues related to class, race, gender and politics. While some remember the 1990s as being marked by prosperity and cultural innovation, others recall recession, conflict and social inequality.

Koto Bolofo, born in South Africa under apartheid, was one of the few Black photographers to be regularly commissioned by style magazines during this decade. His stories ‘BLACK BRITAIN’ for the Italian L’UOMO Vogue and ‘Present and Correct’ for i-D encouraged readers to consider individual and collective experiences of masculinity that were simply not addressed in mainstream popular culture in the UK, which tended towards the celebration of white working-class identity.

Meanwhile, Juergen Teller’s Go-Sees series has developed legendary status, documenting an aspect of the fashion ecosystem that usually goes unseen. Over the course of one year, Teller photographed hundreds of aspiring young models who had been sent by their agency to an informal casting invitation (or a ‘go-see’, as it is termed in the industry) at the photographer’s West London studio. Often shot in the doorway as the models arrived rather than in the more controlled space of the studio itself, the resulting photobook published in 1999 has become a collector’s favourite, compiling over 450 seemingly spontaneous portraits of mostly eager, sometimes apprehensive, teenagers. Among the new faces captured by Teller are many that would come to define fashion imagery of the era, including Devon Aoki, Debra Shaw and Adriana Lima.

In these latter years of the decade, subscribers to independent magazines would have noticed weightier deliveries through their letterboxes.

While the July 1991 issue of i-D consisted of just 82 pages, staple-bound and printed on uncoated paper, the September 1998 issue was glossy, perfect-bound and held almost three times that number. Likewise, Dazed and Confused first appeared in 1991 as a single, folded sheet of A2 paper, while the final issue of the decade came in at 170 pages, with a cover story featuring supermodel Karen Elson, shot by David Sims and styled by Katy England. This expansion tells us something about the prestige and power wielded by independent magazines by the late 1990s, even if these figures pale in comparison to the behemoth that was American Vogue. That the bulk of its mammoth 678-page September 1998 issue was made up of advertising reflects the extent to which brands wanted to be part of these platforms and were willing to pay for the privilege. Consequently, budgets at magazines increased, production swelled and indie talent became superstars.

Acknowledging the value of printed matter is one thing, but being able to spend time with physical copies of magazines from the 1990s is another challenge entirely. Rare back issues can be expensive to purchase and most collections are private. Though Instagram is awash with archive accounts – many of the rarest editorial, scanned at the highest quality – isolated images posted on social media do little to reflect their original context of publication.

‘The Dark Knight Returns’, from the August 1998 issue of The Face, epitomises this decadent lead-up to the new millennium. The foundations of this epic tale are laid out on the opening double-page spread: ‘Blood, betrayal and broadswords. Fashion nobility Alexander McQueen and Jeremy Scott prepare to do battle in the epic quest for Excalibur.’ What follows is far removed from the stripped-back, documentary-informed photography that had come to define the early 1990s. McQueen and Scott feature in person, shot wearing blood-soaked suits of armour originally made by armourer Terry English for the 1981 film Excalibur. They are joined by a cast of supporting characters, including British supermodel Erin O’Connor, who wears chainmail garments by the superstar designers and armour pieces made by Sarah Harmarnee for McQueen’s Autumn/ Winter 1998 collection. The theatricality, affectation and digital post-production of photographer Sean Ellis’s cinematic images shift us towards high camp, taking us far away from the effortless tone of ‘Under-exposure’. A stunt coordinator, Tom Aitken, is even listed in the feature’s credits.

The perceived value of seeing magazines in their entirety has been one catalyst behind the recent founding of publicly accessible magazine libraries, most notably the International Library of Fashion Research in Oslo and New York’s Library180, which opened in Manhattan’s Financial District last year. Both offer free public access to a cache of cultural history. Library180’s co-founder and director, Nikki Igol, explains: ‘I had spent more than 30 years collecting magazines and books, and at a certain point I realised I didn’t want to gatekeep them anymore – I wanted people to use them.’

Spending her time as a librarian in the space, Igol has found it fascinating to witness the different ways in which readers engage with the archive. ‘Some visitors arrive with a very specific research brief, others browse. One of the most interesting things for me is watching different generations engage with the same material. Someone my age might pick up an issue from the 1980s or 1990s and immediately remember where they bought it or what that period felt like. They are transported. Then I’ll watch a 16-year-old pick up the exact same magazine and experience it completely without nostalgia. For one person it’s memory; for the other it’s discovery. I find that incredibly moving.’

As I continue to consider what to do with my own humble collection, Igol turns her attention to the subject of institutions such as Tate dedicating exhibition space to magazines. ‘It acknowledges that visual history isn’t only contained in paintings, photographs or objects that were created with the intention of entering a museum’, she suggests. ‘Magazines aren’t precious because they’re rare; they became rare because nobody thought they were precious. Sometimes the most revealing record of a culture is something that was never expected to survive it.’

^{TATE BRITAIN
The 90s: Art and Fashion, 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027}

^{Adam Murray is a curator, researcher and lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London, where he is Pathway Leader for MA Fashion Image. His book The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home is published by Thames and Hudson.}

^{The 90s: Art and Fashion is supported by McQueen. With additional support from The 90s Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons, Tate Members and Tate Americas Foundation. The media partner is Dazed.}