We didn’t need Google’s annual report to tell us that the ’90s are trending. Designers have been making it clear for over a year, via collections like Donatella Versace’s Spring 2018 ode to her late brother Gianni Versace and Marc Jacobs’s Grunge Redux for Resort 2019. Reissues could end up replacing collaborations as the industry’s preferred method of generating hype. They’ve definitely triggered our collective nostalgia here at Vogue. With the year winding down, our editors share some of their favorite fashion memories from the decade here.
Sally Singer, Creative Director
For my wedding in 1994 at the Chelsea Registry Office in London I wore the pink taffeta Isaac Mizrahi ball skirt that would later be immortalized in Douglas Keeve’s Unzipped (1995). I bought it on sale, of course. I paired it with a very fine-knit cashmere tee from Prada. I thought this pairing was really classic at the time, a sort of homage to Blass and Dior and my entirely nonexistent debutante pedigree. Now it seems, yikes, entirely ’90s.
Mark Holgate, Vogue Fashion News Director
The ’90s were bookended for me with a quintet of supermodels, as Linda, Christy, Naomi, Cindy, and Tatjana were about to become known, on the January 1990 cover of British Vogue. (Cover line: What’s Next?; well, we were about to find out.) And they ended at the Spring 1999 Helmut Lang show, which he held in his Greene Street store in New York when a drop-dead Claudia Schiffer came out in an ivory tuxedo and red lips, somehow neatly tying up everything that had happened in the intervening 10 years.
But for me, personally, the decade really began when I started going to shows in London, particularly one cold Sunday night in October 1994, when I managed to blag (as we used to say then) my way in to see Alexander McQueen’s collection The Birds. It’s kind of impossible, looking at it now, to see how radical, innovative, and downright confrontational as f--k it felt; the waistbands that barely grazed the hip-bones, the scary don’t-look-now contact lenses, the tire marks all over the (impeccably tailored) jackets which were so sharp they didn’t look like they were built for body contact.
Occasionally I’ll re-watch it on YouTube, and scan the audience as much as what’s on the runway, looking to jog memories other than those of the clothes. And no matter how many times I look at it, I always think, what’s missing? And then I remember: No one was able to hold up an iPhone back then. That was what's next.
Virginia Smith, Fashion Director
I was lucky enough to work for Calvin Klein in the mid-to-late ’90s. I arrived from Anne Klein to Calvin—a whole other Klein. The two companies were actually in the same building. One of the reasons I got the job was that I had held the door open for then President and COO, Gabriella Forte, who thankfully remembered my good manners. The offices were a pristine white that was repainted every week. Decoration consisted of black pencils and a Calvin-approved calla lily.
I’d been a fan of Calvin Klein for many years, trolling my mother’s closet whenever possible. It was at Calvin that I started to developed my look and fondness for a wide-leg flared pant. Perhaps this was in part to avoid any mistakes. After Calvin showed his revolutionary “New Length” collection, several PRs were reprimanded for shortening their hemlines!
Calvin helped define the zeitgeist of the New York ’90s. He was a magnet for talent—Kate, Christy, Gwyneth, Marky Mark, and later RZA, Foxy Brown, Macy Gray. An arsenal of great photographers and stylists. Everyone walked through those doors. Being part of his world is something I’ll never forget.
Sarah Mower, Chief Critic
Scanning everything I saw and did on the fashion front line in the ’90s, this surreal moment pops to mind: the day I sat on a bed to interview Helmut Lang. It was way before he became an absolute god of fashion, but—ever on the track of discovering new talent—I’d heard of this interesting underground guy who’d turned up from Vienna with a truckload of cool friends, and was showing in Paris. Somehow or another, I tracked him down. Maybe it was by fax, our only way of communicating in the days when the only other option was landlines. Anyway, I got the message to meet him where he was staying, at L’Hotel, the ornately shabby establishment famous for once being the abode of Oscar Wilde. His room was so tiny that the only available place to sit and scribble my notes was with me wedged on one side of the bed, and him on the other. All I remember is a brilliant conversation with an articulate, thoughtful guy. Afterwards, I raved about him to my fancy fashion journalist friends. “You did WHAT?” they cried. “Who did you say he is again?”
Well, that’s how I met the designer who would revolutionize the way my generation wanted to dress, and whose unilateral move to showing in New York was so seismic that he upended the fashion calendar forever.
I can’t claim I was Helmut’s number one fan, because within a couple of years, there was stiff competition for that all up and down the runways at his shows. All the editors and stylists wore Helmut by the late ’90s. Few designers ever succeed in defining a uniform which people wear every day, but Helmut did that with his narrow black trouser suits, simple layered t-shirts, and crombie-style coats, while slipping in his slyly coded references to harnesses, and rubber, and to haute couture. He did for the young professionals of the ’90s what Giorgio Armani did for the business classes of the ’80s, and what Yves Saint Laurent did for emergent working women in the ’70s. People wept when they saw his family crew walking by: Cordula Reyer, Stella Tennant, Kate Moss, Kirsten Owen, Kristen McMenamy, Nadja Auremann. We projected ourselves onto them; it felt like being part of a chic-cool gang rising to power.
Yes, Helmut Lang was that great. Still relevant, too, and looked up to and quoted by the new generation of designers who were generally busy getting themselves born about the time I knocked on that bedroom door at L’Hotel. Of course he is missed as a designer. It annoys me that I can’t wear his clothes any more, because I wore them so much, I wore them out. Nevetheless, I can’t not approve of the fact that Helmut Lang the man decided to leave fashion. He walked off the stage and started the second life he wanted, as an artist. How many designers manage that kind of silent exit from fashion, reputations 100 percent intact? Only Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, that I can think of: the definition of cool, to the last.
Nicole Phelps, Director Vogue Runway
I spent my earliest years in fashion at WWD and W, but I learned how to dress like an editor at The News sample sales, where I bought armfuls of cool, Martin Margiela sweaters that I wore to literal shreds. My mother came after the trademark tags in back with a pair of scissors once, that was funny. None of the knits remain in my closet, sadly, but I did save one un-throw-out-able dress, the commercial version of this sequin photo print knock-out from Spring 1996. Though it’s not really in good enough shape to wear anymore, it absolutely doesn’t look dated. Fodder for the popular-at-Vogue-Runway idea that Margiela the man is considering a comeback. Oh, it’ll probably never happen, but after years of existing off the fashion grid he did work on the brilliant Palais Galliera exhibition devoted to his two decade career earlier this year, staging the ephemera of the installation rooms himself. So... maybe?
Hamish Bowles, International Editor at Large
As the ’80s waned Christian Lacroix had bade me seek out a young Viennese designer called Helmut Lang who was making reimagined loden jackets with mismatched buttons, but as nice as they were I was still yearning for the master’s pouffes and fichus, and when Helmut left the loden behind and started making organza t-shirt dresses and jeans with painted stripes down the side I must admit it gave me pause.
I had loved Dries van Noten’s Edwardian cricket blazers and Brassai frocks but I was bemused by the lab-coated fashion medics dissecting clothes in the rundown apartment where Dries’s fellow countryman and art school colleague Martin Margiela was reinventing fashion. High on the glitz and razzle dazzle of the ’80s, I decided quite early on in the decade that the ’90s really weren’t for me. Suddenly my fashion shoots smelled of Phytoplage rather than Elnett and the girls looked bedraggled rather that jhoozed. It was time to switch lanes and thank goodness Anna Wintour and Vogue beckoned me across the Atlantic with the lure of houses and décor.
But not every runway succumbed to Grunge. Gianni Versace was still making clothes that shouted rather than whispered—when he caught the Grunge zeitgeist the ’30s looking slips that he layered over gauzy striped tops were lavishly beaded. In the full bloom of Grungiana Gianni was busy preparing a book of a decade of his flamboyant designs rather deftly titled VANITAS: DESIGNS. The dynamic fashion images of Avedon, Penn, and Weber would be juxtaposed with the magnificent costumes he designed for Maurice Bejart’s ballets, opera, and theater. Sundry illustrious contributors were writing for the tome, and I was thrilled when he invited me to contribute an essay on his theater designs. How could I forget those splendid Bejart pieces, and his fantastic designs for Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, which I had been lucky enough to see at London’s Royal Opera House on the cusp of the new decade? The famous New Zealand born soprano Kiri te Kanawa had starred as the Countess and Gianni made her a trained 30s gown with black beads and further bedazzled with art deco motifs in brilliant stained glass colors. There were so many beads encrusted on it that the dress made quite a racket as Dame Kiri trailed across the stage. In fact, it bid fair to interfere with her high Cs, but no matter: she had never looked better.
After I submitted my text, Gianni said that he’d like to thank me with some clothes which was a most unexpected bonus. He had recently opened a palatial shopping emporium on Old Bond Street in London and it was there that I went with his eagle-eyed publicity maven Emanuela Schmeidler. I was known for a peacock wardrobe but I had never gone quite this far. I rifled sheepishly through the racks trying to find a little modest something that I could assimilate into my wardrobe: I soon realized that I had come to the wrong place for that. I thought at a pinch that a linen jacket in strident lilac might be just the thing but La Schmeidler prodded me on to ever greater extravagances. A black lace shirt? How about a white lace one too? A ribbed silk waistcoat in an 18th century print seemingly recolored by Hanna-Barbera for the South Beach sun? Take the matching shirt too. At this point I had thrown caution to the winds and was embracing the Versace message of more is more. Realizing that it was going to be all about a total look I disappeared into the dressing room with a pair of drainpipe jeans printed with sunbursts on a flame colored ground. I had to lie on the floor to prise them on but when I looked in the gilded mirror I had to admit that they did wonders for my derriere.
Never before or since have I experienced such extravagance in a store. But I took the dix huitieme silks to the Met and the jeans to Tangier and I must say I was the cynosure of all eyes in both locales. Gianni sent me a wonderful drawing of me, myself, and I striking various Stephen Tennant-ish attitudes in his clobber that I prize above rubies.
Those pieces should be carefully catalogued in my archive but I can’t bear to part with them to acid free paper’d storage so they still live in my wardrobe where I have hung them prominently enough that I see them every morning and, like their author, they are so brimming over with the joy of life that they make my heart sing every time I look at them.
Chioma Nnadi, Vogue.com Fashion News Director
I remember being obsessed with everything Bjork wore in the ’90s, including all of her ugly shoes (she was way ahead on that trend). I'd always see her walking around Soho in London with her son wearing Nike Air Rifts—the brand's first Japanese-style split-toe sneaker—so of course I went out and bought the exact same pair. At that point they were super limited-edition, basically only available in a few stores outside of Tokyo. I saved up enough from my summer job making sandwiches in a cafe to get a pair of the Reebok Insta Pump Furys she wore, too. Then it was these plastic clogs that Birkenstock made called Birki's, an early precursor of Crocs. I wore them on my first day of college in Manchester. They were bright red and totally ridiculous but really good in the rain.
Lynn Yaeger, Contributor
“I want always to mix the industrial way of doing things, with the patrimonio of the past, with the artisanal tradition,” Miuccia Prada told The New Yorker in 1990, describing the iconic nylon Prada knapsack, made of an industrial material formerly used for army tents.
I didn’t care a bit about patrimonio or the past when I got my first nylon Prada backpack almost three decades ago. I was looking forward to the future! I finally had enough money to buy this sort of thing with my own salary, and if it was faintly ridiculous—after all, wasn’t it just fabric, with maybe a few buckles—what did I care? If a Vuitton Speedy had to be shared with the matrons who embraced it, if an Hermès Birkin remained, then as now, tantalizingly out of reach, a Prada nylon knapsack ushered in the ’90s by offering a new, transgressive notion of luxury.
Launched in the 1980s but finding full flower in the ’90s, the nylon Prada satchel actually had many virtues. In a time of heavy-as-lead carryalls—remember the padlocked Chloe Paddington, rumored to weigh in at three pounds empty? —a Prada was feather-light. You could scrub it with soap and water if it had had a hard night; it was never too fussy to reject just one more thing stuffed into it. You knew it didn’t come from the sporting goods store, because those backpacks weren’t available in chartreuse and blood orange and all the other shades Prada eventually introduced, and they also didn’t have the little metal triangle, a flourish that made me weak with desire, that read “Prada Milano Dal 1913.”
I have so many memories of these Pradas: the scarlet one that got full of sand in Cherry Grove—because it could go from a fancy-dress ball to a day at the beach (not that I got invited to any balls); the tote version I bought at the Prada store on 57th Street, that had that magical “Dal 1913” spelled out in iridescent beads.
Was it their radical inclusiveness that made these humble Prada products so seductive? Whatever the reason, the insouciant charm of the original knapsack remains a symbol of unaffected chic, beckoning even the least sporty among us to strap a nylon backpack over our tutus and hit the streets.
Laird Borrelli-Persson, Archive Editor
I moved to New York in 1990 and, not having a big budget, lived fashion largely through magazines. Sometimes I’d get lucky and score something from the Century 21 in Brooklyn like ripped and splattered painter’s jeans from Helmut Lang that my parents’ couldn’t believe I had spent money on; a conceptual and droopy Margiela skirt not really suitable for my job at Sotheby’s; or a lilac suit, by Montana, I think, that made me feel like a million until a man on the street made a snide comment about my football shoulders. There are at least two ’90s survivors in my closet, and I like to imagine they sometimes pass the time reminiscing about the old days. One is a pair of heels climbing with coral from Prada’s Spring 1997 show—the one with the incredible mist ads that I hung on the walls. The other, from the same season, is an Ann Demeulemeester t-shirt goddess dress that I bought in Paris. It never has and never will suit me, but I was always partial to the Belgian brand of conceptualism, and fell for the pure simplicity and genius of the concept. And so this length of cotton, angelic white, remains enshrined in a drawer in my closet, like a fly in amber.
https://www.vogue.com/article/90s-vogue-editors-fashion-memories-versace-calvin-klein-helmut-lang
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