I cling to my Gen X status. Born in 1977, I just scraped in - which meant the 90s wasn't a decade I observed, it was the one I grew up in. School, then university, then in 1999, my first proper job: fashion assistant at the London Evening Standard.
This morning I walked round Tate Britain, a day before Edward Enninful's hugely anticipated The 90s: Art and Fashion opens to the public, and all I could think was: take me back.
Not just for my younger self. For the feeling. Britain was coming out of recession and you could feel it - in the music, the clothes, this mad, optimistic idea that anyone from anywhere could make it. It was a brilliant time to be British.
© Guy Marineau, Vogue © Condé NastMy real education came from my older sister. She bought The Face religiously, and I'd wait until she was done, then read it cover to cover. The photography, the attitude, the models who actually looked like real people. A friend had started dating Kate Moss's brother Nick, when her Corinne Day shoot at Camber Sands, appeared on the cover in 1990. I just thought that was so cool.
© Juergen TellerSeeing Corinne Day's work on the gallery walls today took me back to that place. Juergen Teller and David Sims are there too - the photographers who defined the decade. Vintage i-D and Dazed and Confused magazines, where their work appeared were
© Adama JallohEdward didn’t just live through 90s culture, he helped shape them. He became fashion director of i-D, aged 18, while studying at Goldsmiths, University of London. Then, before becoming editor in chief of British Vogue in 2017, where he stayed until 2024, he served as contributing editor for Italian Vogue during the late 1990s and 2000s.
I left with a pang. Not because everything was perfect then - it wasn't, and the show doesn't pretend it was. It's that fearless optimism. That feeling that everything was possible.
Maybe that's the real reason to go. Not just to remember how it was, but to nick a bit of that spirit for right now.
