Tate Britain Stages Enninful-Curated 90s Art Show — SkimNews
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- Tate Britain opens "The 90s: Art and Fashion" from 8 October through 14 February, curated by Edward Enninful, who worked at i-D magazine during the decade
- Featured works include Juergen Teller's 1998 shot of Kate Moss with pink hair before she dyed it back from a Versace show, Sarah Lucas's 1997 tights-stuffed "Pauline Bunny" sculptures, and Sean Ellis's 1998 Alexander McQueen shoot styled by Isabella Blow, which Ellis describes as staging McQueen "outnumbered" facing his death
- Senior curator Dominique Heyse-Moore says Naomi Campbell "often didn't get booked in the UK" because of a persistent preference for Kate Moss's "androgynous, indie" British style, and frames Campbell's 1994 Babywoman cover around questions of Black girlhood
- Miranda Sawyer's accompanying essay argues the creative burst rested on £60-per-week central London flatshares, squatting, and a music industry flush with CD money that funded indie labels and magazines willing to hire unknowns
- Photographer Fergus Greer recalls shooting Leigh Bowery in a full-length rubber bodysuit in 1994, just before Bowery's death from an AIDS-related illness ended their six-year collaboration, predicting the images "100 years on will hang on gallery walls"
- Jon Shard remembers the Haçienda's gay night "Flesh" as a space where "people creating things for themselves" defined the era's experimental energy
Why it matters: The exhibition reframes 90s British creativity as a product of structural conditions — sub-£100 weekly rents, squat-friendly housing, and CD-wealth cascading from major labels to indie magazines — that no longer exist in London. Heyse-Moore's revelation that Naomi Campbell was routinely passed over for UK bookings also surfaces a racial gatekeeping dimension the cheerful nostalgia framing risks burying.
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