Tate Britain opens The 90s: Art and Fashion on Thursday 8 October, with Edward Enninful as guest curator. More than 100 photographs, paintings, sculptures and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers fill the Main Floor at Millbank until 14 February 2027, from the Young British Artists to Alexander McQueen. The lead image is Juergen Teller’s Young Pink Kate, London 1998, and the cast runs from Corinne Day and Nigel Shafran to Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano. Tate calls it the first exhibition to explore the art, photography and fashion of the 1990s, and McQueen, the house, supports it. Three decades on, the magazines, clubs and catwalks of that London are being hung as art history.
Nearly 70 names, from Corinne Day to Damien Hirst
The list is long and deliberately mixed. Among the designers are Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Ozwald Boateng, Joe Casely-Hayford, Philip Treacy and Stella McCartney. The photographers include Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Nigel Shafran, Nick Knight, David Sims, Craig McDean, Steven Meisel, Elaine Constantine and Wolfgang Tillmans. The artists run from Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume to Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, Gillian Wearing, Jenny Saville, Mona Hatoum, Sonia Boyce and Yinka Shonibare. Tickets cost £22, or £20 for concessions. Members go free, and members of Tate Collective, aged 16 to 25, pay £5. The gallery opens daily from 10.00 to 18.00, and on Friday 13 November a Late at Tate Britain keeps the show open until 22.00, free for over-18s. The full list and the booking are on Tate’s exhibition page.
From grunge to the closing room
Tate has published the order of the themes rather than a room plan. The show opens with what the gallery calls a taste for “imperfection and realness with a Do-It-Yourself attitude”: photographs by Corinne Day, Nigel Shafran and Juergen Teller for i-D and Dazed and Confused, the magazines that defined a new “anti-fashion” grunge style. Then come real people as muses, in work by Barbara Walker, Jenny Saville and Gillian Wearing, and the anarchic spirit of Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Sarah Lucas. Nightlife follows, from Mark Leckey’s 1999 film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore to the Haçienda in Manchester and Bagley’s in London, acid house, jungle and drum and bass, raves and free parties. A section on Black British designers brings suits by Ozwald Boateng, runway footage of Joe Casely-Hayford’s presentations and fashion photography by Koto Bolofo. The conceptual turn runs from Helen Chadwick and Jake and Dinos Chapman to the pared-back forms of Rachel Whiteread and Gary Hume, and to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde sculptures. The last room belongs to artists and designers who reckoned with Britain’s past and future, Yinka Shonibare and Maud Sulter beside Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano.
“Fashion didn’t exist in isolation; it was part of a wider cultural conversation unfolding in real time.” Edward Enninful, in Tate Etc., autumn 2026.
Three McQueens
Visitors will meet three McQueens. The first is the house, which supports the exhibition. The second is its founder, Alexander McQueen, whose presentations Tate describes as “provocative, dramatic and sometimes nightmarish”; Tate pairs him with Hussein Chalayan, whose clothes were inspired by everyday objects, as designers who blurred the lines between art and fashion. One of the gallery’s images shows a look from McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1998 collection. The third is the artist Steve McQueen, represented by Bear, his first major film, from 1993, and by Pink Nails of 1999. Photography runs between them. Nick Knight, David Sims and Craig McDean brought a starker, more conceptual image, and Wolfgang Tillmans is here with Concorde Grid of 1997. Tate has not said how many garments are on show or which houses lent them. One piece proved elusive. Enninful told Dazed, the exhibition’s media partner, that the Liza Bruce slip dress Kate Moss wore in 1993 was “very difficult” to get, and the magazine reports that a photograph of that moment will hang instead.
Enninful’s London
Tate introduces Edward Enninful as a “fashion industry game changer” whose “lived experience of the decade informs the exhibition”, and he curates it with five Tate colleagues, among them Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain. Enninful became fashion editor of i-D at 18, by the magazine’s own account, edited British Vogue from 2017 to 2024 and now runs EE72, the company behind the quarterly magazine 72, as co-founder and chief creative officer. The project went public almost a year ago. On 24 October 2025, at the Petit Palais during Art Basel Paris, he led conversations with Sonia Boyce, Yinka Shonibare, Mark Leckey and Juergen Teller that Art Basel called “a public prelude” to the show. The catalogue, edited by Enninful and Dominique Heyse-Moore, runs to 240 pages with 27 contributors, Sarah Burton, Jarvis Cocker, Stella McCartney and Wolfgang Tillmans among them. On Friday 9 October Enninful and Afua Hirsch discuss London in the 90s in the Clore Auditorium, an evening already sold out, and on 22 October Miranda Sawyer records her podcast Talk ’90s To Me there with the photographers Normski, Vinca Petersen and Poulomi Desai.
Freeze, the YBAs and the 1998 Turner Prize
The decade had its labels early. Tate’s own glossary dates the first use of “young British artists” to Michael Corris in Artforum in May 1992, and the acronym YBA to Art Monthly in 1996; the group’s story starts with Freeze, the exhibition Damien Hirst organised in 1988 while still a student at Goldsmiths. In 1998 Chris Ofili won the Turner Prize, the first painter to do so since Howard Hodgkin in 1985, against a shortlist that included Cathy de Monchaux and Sam Taylor-Wood, now Sam Taylor-Johnson. Both are in this show. That is the point Enninful makes. “When they came to me initially they thought it was going to be a YBA exhibition,” he told Dazed. It became something wider, with club photographers, stylists and Black British tailoring on the same floor as Hirst. The timing suits the city. Frieze London and Frieze Masters fill Regent’s Park from 14 to 18 October, as set out in our guide to the October fairs, and the National Gallery’s Renoir and Love opened on 3 October.
The Luxury.it perspective
The phrase to take from Tate Etc. is Enninful’s own: “magazines didn’t just document culture; they helped create it”. This show is built on that idea. Pages from i-D and Dazed, which were meant to be thrown away at the end of the month, now hang in a national gallery, and a photograph of a slip dress counts as a document of its time. For fashion readers it is a rare chance to see the photographers behind the clothes given the same wall space as the painters. The practical advice: book a weekday morning, or keep Friday 13 November free for the Late, which costs nothing for over-18s. Visitors aged 16 to 25 can join Tate Collective and pay £5. One room contains flashing lights, and Tate asks photosensitive visitors to speak to a member of staff.
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