The 90s Art and Fashion Review: A Shallow Magazine Spread 2026

The 90s: Art and Fashion exhibition at Tate Britain has been billed as a spectacular revisit of a defining decade, but our review finds it to be a dismally shallow show that feels more like a magazine spread than a serious art exhibition. Curated by former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, the exhibition mixes art and fashion with an overwhelming emphasis on the latter, leaving little room for the depth that defined the era's best work.

Art and Fashion in the 1990s: A Missed Opportunity

The 1990s was a transformative decade for British art. At the start, no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels. Tate Britain, then known as the Tate Gallery, played a starring role, staging the Turner Prize in years when bisected cows, concrete houses, and elephant dung got the nation arguing. A show that spectacularly revisited fin-de-siecle British art would be an interesting proposition. Instead, former Vogue editor Edward Enninful has been invited to stage his personal fantasy version of that decade, mixing up art and fashion, with the emphasis very much on fashion. There’s more about Isabella Blow than Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by only a fraction of her work.

The Chapman Brothers: A Moment of Depth

Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake. Yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately, this show is neither.

Key Takeaways from the Exhibition

• Fashion dominates art: The exhibition leans heavily on fashion, with figures like Isabella Blow getting more attention than artists like Rachel Whiteread.
• Lack of depth: The show fails to capture the intellectual and emotional complexity of 1990s British art.
• Missed opportunity: Tate Britain could have staged a spectacular revisit of the decade but instead presents a personal fantasy.
• Chapman Brothers standout: Their work provides the only moment of depth in an otherwise shallow exhibition.

Comparing Art and Fashion in the 1990s

The 1990s saw both art and fashion push boundaries, but their representation in this exhibition is unbalanced. The table below highlights key figures and their presence in the show.

The Role of Tate Britain in the 1990s

Tate Britain was at the heart of the 1990s art scene, hosting the Turner Prize and showcasing the Young British Artists who would come to define the decade. A retrospective that truly captured this era would need to balance the shock and awe of the art with the cultural context of the time. Instead, The 90s: Art and Fashion reduces the decade to a stylish but superficial display, more suited to the pages of a fashion magazine than the walls of a major gallery.

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