Tate Show Maps 90s British Cool's Hidden Architecture — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Edward Enninful curated "The 90s: Art and Fashion" at Tate Britain (8 October–14 February), drawing on his 1990s tenure at i-D magazine to assemble photographs of models, artists and club scenes.
- Miranda Sawyer identifies the "hidden architecture" of 90s British creativity: she never paid more than £60 a week for a London flatshare room, while CD revenues let major labels fund indie labels and pay music magazines to hire enthusiastic unknowns.
- The exhibition features Juergen Teller's "Young Pink Kate" (1998) — Kate Moss photographed with pink hair before dyeing it back after a Versace show — and Sean Ellis's "The Dark Knight Returns" (1998), styled by Isabella Blow, depicting Alexander McQueen as a knight facing his death.
- Sarah Lucas's "Pauline Bunny" (1997) — tights stuffed with materials slumped on a charity-shop chair — is, per senior curator Dominique Heyse-Moore, named after club Bunny Girls and reads as a sex worker; Lucas's recent bunnies now depict older, more assertive women's bodies.
- Fergus Greer shot Leigh Bowery in "Session VII, Look 38" (1994) in a full-length rubber bodysuit on large format just before Bowery's death from an Aids-related illness ended their six-year collaboration.
- Heyse-Moore notes Ellen von Unwerth's Naomi Campbell "Babywoman" album cover (1994) reflects how Campbell "often didn't get booked in the UK" because British style was defined as Kate Moss's "androgynous, indie look" — and that the title itself raises questions around Black girlhood.
- The show also includes Sam Taylor-Johnson's "Fuck Suck Spank Wank" (1993), described as overtly challenging how women were supposed to appear in art, and Jon Shard's "Flesh at Haçienda" (1994), capturing a gay club night where, Shard says, people experimented more freely with self-presentation.
Why it matters: The exhibition frames 90s British creativity as structurally contingent — built on £60/week London rents and CD-funded indie ecosystems now erased by gentrification and streaming. The source notes the inner-city warehouses, disused studios and squatted flats that housed the scene have since been "repurposed into flash new apartments," so visitors are looking at a portrait of conditions that can no longer exist in today's London.
Ask SkimNews
