Your guide to The 90s: Art and Fashion

This exhibition explores the a decade defined by bold creativity and rebellious spirit.

Drawing on curator Edward Enninful OBE’s experience of the decade, The 90s: Art and Fashion brings together photography, fashion, art and design to explore a moment when a new generation transformed British culture. Encounter iconic work by artists and photographers including Steve McQueen, Sarah Lucas, Yinka Shonibare, Corinne Day and Juergen Teller, alongside fashion by Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.

Experience the energy, experimentation and cultural shifts of the 1990s, and discover the lasting influence of a decade that broke down boundaries between art, fashion and popular culture.

Listen to the sound of the 90's as selected by the photographers who documented the faces, fashion and energy of youth countercultures across Britain in the 90's.

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,1999

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore traces British dance music culture from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Crowds of devotees lose themselves on the dance floor, from legendary northern soul clubs to acid house warehouse raves. Mark Leckey’s compilation of found videotape footage explores nostalgia and self-expression against a backdrop of class and cultural transformation. Leckey has described it as a ‘ghost film’ in which grainy VHS clips evoke ‘the end of the analogue age’.

Vivienne Westwood, Anglomania, Autumn/Winter 1993

The exhibition features a tartan look from Vivienne Westwood’s autumn/winter 1993 collection Anglomania, inspired by an 18th-century French fascination with all things English. The outfit combines references to upper-class English and Scottish country dress, including heavy wool, kilts and riding hats, with 18th-century French silhouettes.

Reworking historic fashion was central to Westwood’s practice. She described looking to the past as a way of challenging convention, explaining: ‘All my ideas come from studying the ideas of the past ... I design clothes in the hope of breaking convention.’

Yinka Shonibare CBE, The Swing (after Fragonard), 2001

Yinka Shonibare reimagines Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 18th-century painting The Swing. In this version, the woman is headless and her opulent gown is made of brightly patterned Dutch wax fabric. The textile is a product of colonial trade routes between Indonesia, the Netherlands, the UK and West Africa, where it became associated with African style. Shonibare connects these complex histories of colonialism to European art.

He invites us to look again at The Swing and consider how Fragonard’s scene of aristocratic leisure and luxury was made possible by imperial wealth. 

Sir Steve McQueen, Bear, 1993

In this exhibtion you can watch Steve McQueen’s Bear, a silent film featuring two naked Black men, one of whom is the artist. The camerawork is disorientating, tracking the hypnotic movements of their bodies. They confront each other in an ambiguous encounter that fluctuates between aggression and tenderness. The film’s unsettling psychological tension subverts racialised media narratives about Black men. 

McQueen describes making the work as a ‘risk’ he took to ‘go where the pain is’. 

Abigail Lane, Bottom Wallpaper, 1992–7

In Abigail Lane's Bottom Wallpaper she covers the gallery wall with the repeated print of a female bottom. The artist’s model sat on the nearby ink-pad chair and pressed her body on to wallpaper. The installation playfully subverts the idea of the unique autograph. Wallpaper, a comforting staple of middle-class British homes, becomes an uncanny study of human anatomy. Lane refers to it as ‘a kind of artistic mooning’.

She described the process of wrapping a gallery with this intimate imagery as ‘both joke and protest’, bringing ‘a kind of defiance to the gallery walls’. 

Jim Lambie, Zobop, 1999

Zobop is an ongoing series of floor designs by Jim Lambie. Originally active as a DJ and musician, he explores music as a reference and a structural principle for his art.

Zobop is site-specific and intends to transform everyday places into immersive, energetic experiences. The title recalls ‘bebop’, the fast-paced style of jazz. Lambie constructs each floor installation from strips of multi-coloured, industrial vinyl tape. Starting from the outer edge of a space, he traces its contours in concentric lines inward. The result is a psychedelic space pulsating with rhythm, movement and colour where the ground seems to shift beneath your feet.

The 90s: Art and Fashion is on at Tate Britain 8 October 2026 – 14 February 2027