Is the Tate’s ’90s Art and Fashion Show a Delight or a Faux Pas?

Louis Vuitton had barely closed out Paris fashion week when the fashion world had one of the biggest nights of the year—in London. Donatella Versace, Givenchy’s Sarah Burton, Burberry’s Daniel Lee, photographer Ellen von Unwerth, British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan were among the glittering crowd that turned out for the opening of “The 90s: Art and Fashion,” on Tuesday night. This is perhaps not surprising, given that one of the curators is Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who brought back glamour to the Condé Nast title during his tenure from 2017 to 2024. (Enninful worked with Tate Britain curators Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Alex Farquharson, and Celeste McEvoy on the show.)

Some among the British art press, however, were not impressed.

The Times of London’s chief art critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote that “I expected a celebration of the Nineties — instead it was a fashion disaster.” The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones agreed, writing “this isn’t an exhibition, it’s a magazine spread.” Giving the show one out of five stars, he wrote, “I hoped what I’d seen was a prologue to more art, bigger art, with enough space to appreciate it. But no. That’s it. You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of The Face in a dentist’s waiting room.”

Not all the critics were as harsh—the Daily Telegraph’s chief art critic Alastair Sooke gave the show five stars and wrote that it left him “buzzing,” while The Independent’s Stephen Armstrong remarked that “the hope on the walls of this five-star exhibition is heartbreaking”—but it’s easy to understand why some are turning their noses up—the run-up to the opening has been more about the fashion than the art. Posters of Kate Moss photographed by Juergen Teller have been plastered over the city and praise for the exhibition has been handed largely to Enninful.

I spoke with one of the other curators, the Tate’s Jessica Vaughan, to find here a little more about the show, which opens to the public today. Speaking about the decade the show focuses on, she said, “there was this huge moment of growth and creativity, a time which really defined the parameters of what we now consider contemporary art. There was also this real boom in fashion and [the show] is about how they were feeding off one another and how the thematics were parallels in the things that these young creatives were interested in.”

The real goal of the exhibition, she said, is to spotlight Britain beyond the Young British Artists, or YBAs, who were predominantly white. “The story of the YBAs is really well-known and some of the criticism we’ve got so far is that we haven’t included those big names enough,” said Vaughn. “There are works by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst there. We just wanted to spotlight other artists who we didn’t think got their dues and Edward always did that in fashion.” Those boldface names are paired with ones not typically associated with the YBAs, like Hamad Butt, Eileen Perrier, Yinka Shonibare, and Barbara Walker.

Important and poignant works in the exhibition often tackle queer themes, which largely were not historicized alongside the famous YBAs, whose art often privileged provocation. One of these is Familiars (1992), a three-part sculptural installation by Butt, a queer South Asian artist. The piece, which is in the Tate’s collection, includes vacuum-sealed glass bulbs containing toxic chemicals; viewers are invited to engage with sculpture—at the risk of cracking one of the bulbs and releasing toxic chemicals, a comment on homophobia and contagion during the AIDS crisis. When Familiars last showed at the Tate in the ’90s, one of the vials did crack, resulting in the whole gallery being evacuated. “It’s the idea that the thing that we’re most attracted to might be the thing that’s the most threatening to us and the work has a mythology around it,” Vaughn said of the work.

Another powerful work is Steve McQueen’s 1993 film Bear, depicting two Black men wrestling. They are simultaneously affectionate and combative, dripping with homoerotism. Vaughn argues that even though artists such as McQueen are equally as well-known as Hirst and Emin, they are rarely featured in the same context as the YBAs.

Another story being told in the exhibition is of female artists and the experience of inhabiting a female body. On display is Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank (1993), a photograph of the artist wearing a T-shirt printed with those four words, her white denim jeans around her ankles. (The museum has recreated the t-shirt, and it’s for sale in the gift shop.) Not far away is Lucas’s now iconic photograph Chicken Knickers (1997), showing a raw whole chicken affixed to the front of a woman’s underwear. “We wanted to capture what it was to be a young woman at that time and to counter the images of Kate Moss by Corrine Day and others,” Vaughn said of the juxtaposition of these artworks with the Moss images that have dominated the show’s marketing campaign.

In other ways, the show is relevant to London today. Given that the UK is currently facing an upswing in right-wing politics—in September, British cryptocurrency billionaire Ben Delo donated £36 million to the far-right political party Reform UK, the biggest single donation a political party has received in the UK—the room that looks at life post–Margaret Thatcher feels prescient. It features disused urban spaces and the photography of Day and Juergen Teller. And given that more than a quarter of London’s late-night venues went dark between 2020 and 2025, there was a poignant nostalgia to the gallery dedicated to different types of nightlife in the UK in the ’90s, from queer parties to drum and bass to acid house. Perhaps those hard on the show didn’t catch how a reevaluation of the past might offer something for the present.