New Tate Britain exhibition splits critics over nineties art

The biggest argument in British culture this autumn is hanging on the walls of Tate Britain. The new Tate Britain exhibition, "The 90s: Art and Fashion," opened on October 8 as the first major exhibition to treat the decade's art, photography and fashion as a single story. Co-curated by Edward Enninful, the former British Vogue editor, it gathers more than one hundred works, from grunge-era photography to runway pieces.

The reviews have been anything but unanimous. Waldemar Januszczak, chief art critic of The Times of London, dismissed the show as a fashion disaster, while The Guardian's Jonathan Jones awarded it a single star and called it a magazine spread. On the other side, the Daily Telegraph's Alastair Sooke and The Independent's Stephen Armstrong both gave it five stars, according to a roundup of the criticism published by USAArtNews. The split says something about how fiercely the decade still divides opinion.

The show arrives at a moment when the decade is being revisited from several directions at once. The Millbank gallery is betting that a generation too young to remember the originals will turn up for the clothes, the club photography and the gossip, while older visitors get the version of the nineties they actually lived through. The star-studded opening drew Donatella Versace, Givenchy designer Sarah Burton and photographer Ellen von Unwerth, USAArtNews reported, and Visit London's visitor guide notes that an audio guide is available to download in advance.

A love letter to the decade's rule-breakers

The exhibition makes its case through the artists and photographers who defined the era from the ground up. Corinne Day and Juergen Teller's gritty portraits of Kate Moss sit alongside work by the Young British Artists, including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, while designs by Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan show how the boundary between fashion and art dissolved. Rave culture, club nights and the do-it-yourself spirit that followed the recession of the 1980s get their own rooms, and the curators give space to questions of race, class and diversity that sat beneath the Cool Britannia gloss, Hypebeast reported.

Other critics found plenty to like. A review in Queerguru praised Enninful for steering clear of simple nostalgia, arguing that the first rooms treat queer artists, people of color and women as the decade's driving creative force. The Artlyst review singled out Barbara Walker's tender portrait of her daughter and Steve McQueen's early film Bear as the show's quieter standouts, even while calling the exhibition overstuffed. Visit London, in a visitor-oriented write-up, described the rooms as unexpectedly varied, with raw, unpolished imagery that feels like a deliberate break from today's screen-saturated way of looking.

The show also takes aim at who gets to tell the decade's story. Rooms devoted to Black British creativity include Donald Rodney's small, searing sculpture made from his own skin and Sonia Boyce's photographs of Black hairstyles, while the final gallery hands the last word to Yinka Shonibare's playful take on Fragonard's swing. The message is that the nineties belonged to far more than the faces on the posters, and the curators have made sure the walls reflect that breadth.

The show arrives at a moment when the decade is being revisited from several directions at once. The Millbank gallery is betting that a generation too young to remember the originals will turn up for the clothes, the club photography and the gossip, while older visitors get the version of the nineties they actually lived through. The star-studded opening drew Donatella Versace, Givenchy designer Sarah Burton and photographer Ellen von Unwerth, USAArtNews reported, and Visit London's visitor guide notes that an audio guide is available to download in advance.

Why the nineties still run the timeline

Part of the fuss comes down to how much of the decade never left. Its loose tailoring, lo-fi photography and club flyers still shape what appears on high streets and feeds, and younger shoppers have embraced archive fashion with the same seriousness the show gives the originals. Enninful, who took a fashion director job at a London style magazine while still a teenager, treats the period as personal history rather than a museum exercise, which is exactly what divides the critics: fans hear a firsthand account, skeptics hear a memoir in gallery form.

That tension is probably the point. An exhibition that tried to be neutral about the nineties would have missed what made the decade matter, which was the sense that outsiders were suddenly running the culture. Visitors can judge the Tate Britain exhibition for themselves through February at the Millbank gallery, and the shouting from the review pages is likely to keep going long after the doors open each morning.