The Eight Trends That Defined High Fashion in the 1990s

What I wanted to underscore with '90s fashion, really starting in the beginning of the decade, was that a lot of what you see is a pretty direct reaction to the opulence of the 1980s. If you were wearing high fashion, you could tell in the late '80s that something was expensive. It was a very in-your-face sense of luxury. Minimalism is also luxury, but it's just much more subtle and actually required someone who really understood fashion to get it. You can begin to see, for example, Calvin Klein working more minimalist looks into his collections already by the late 1980s, so it's not like this is a strictly '90s trend.

There were also economic issues at the beginning of the decade. The U.S. was in an economic slump. I believe that the U.K. was in a recession as well. Looking toward the more minimalist, subdued style just seemed to make more sense. So even if you had the money for luxury fashion, it was becoming kind of tacky to flaunt it. I think these two things together is the reason for minimalism.

With minimalism, what I found so interesting was that it goes in and out over the course of the decade. You start to see it in the very early '90s coming to the forefront, and then you see it fade away, and then it comes back. By 1997, it’s the revival of minimalism. I think it was a style that traversed a lot of different brands and designers, and was something that worked its way into the mainstream, as well as high fashion, which is why we always think about '90s minimalism when we think of the '90s.

Deconstruction is a term that we started to see applied to fashion only during the 1990s. The style itself really stems from the Japanese avant-garde designers during the 1980s. It's something that Martin Margiela starts to adopt into his work by the late ’80s. He and Rei Kawakubo really respected each other's work. They actually did a runway show together at some point.

In fact, it was an early Margiela show that Bill Cunningham was writing about. He referred to the collection as deconstructivist, which was a term that was really only used to describe architecture prior to that time, and it really caught on to describe fashion. It's not that deconstructionism is a new style, but it's a new term in the 1990s.

During the 1980s, these styles were really avant-garde, really edgy, and a big topic of discussion, but very slowly working their way into the fashion mainstream several years later. You have somebody like Rei Kawakubo, who was well-known, but she becomes better-known as we get into the ’90s. Her work begins to influence a number of other designers, Margiela being a shining example, but also someone like Maria Cornejo. Her work is polished, beautiful, and avant-garde, but you wouldn't necessarily look at it and say she's absolutely been inspired by Kawakubo. But she was, and she’s talked about it. It’s also the same with Ann Demeulemeester.

We're getting to the end of the 20th century, and technology works its way in. In some instances, it's only visually referenced; this idea of what the Internet might look like and put onto a garment, for example. Then there's the really fantastic McQueen for Givenchy collection, the one where all the clothing was either printed or somehow had this circuit-board motif. He also had these LED garments that lit up. It was this kind of literal overlap between fashionable garments and technology.

What I also found interesting was how the Internet was only just beginning to play a role in fashion and consumerism. I don't really remember a time before fashion was all over the Internet. It was so fascinating to read Bill Cunningham, who wrote a great article about attending the fashion shows and seeing photographers beginning to use digital cameras for the first time. This meant that the photographs taken on the runways could be either printed immediately after the shows or sent around really quickly to fashion editors around the world. To think of that now, I mean, it's kind of funny, because it wasn't that long ago, but it made a huge impact on how quickly fashion was disseminated.

Then, of course, we have things like online shopping and the statistics of what was considered big sales. Kenneth Cole, for example, had a million dollars in online trade in 1999, which was considered enormous for the time. Now, who knows? We're seeing 200 times that. I think it's $102 billion nowadays.

It was appropriation. I am not afraid to say that, because it's true. Galliano put forth a war bonnet in a Dior collection in the '90s, and that would never fly today. But we were already starting to see conversations during the 1990s about, for example, how it would be better that a Chinese designer do a China-inspired collection, rather than a Western designer or European designer looking to Chinese culture. My challenge was to address that this was a big part of '90s fashion and that this idea of the global wardrobe was something that was celebrated.

It’s fine to look at it through our 21st-century eyes, but we also have to do that with some understanding and acknowledgement that absolutely no way would you do this Dior collection now. We’ve moved forward, and that's fantastic.

In general, this idea of globalism was more about possibilities for travel, this idea that the world was getting smaller. If you read interviews with Jean Paul Gaultier, he talks about how his work, which is considered cultural appropriation today, was his way of celebrating other cultures, saying how he went to these places. He thought they were beautiful, and that's the reason he wanted to work them into his collections. But now, of course, we're more aware of the implications—the overlooking of people who are making these styles and not including them, acknowledging them, paying them. It was problematic, and we're much more aware of that now.