It was, as male model Tyson Beckford says in the opening episode of In Vogue: The 90s, “a great time to be alive”. Especially if you happened to be young, famous and beautiful. Beckford spent that decade gazing down imperiously on mere mortals, from the supersized Ralph Lauren billboards on which he starred in glossy advertising campaigns. Sort of like Christ the Redeemer over Rio, but in a tight white Polo vest and with one arm around Naomi Campbell.
In the 1990s, fashion had the power to anoint our gods and goddesses. A Vogue cover was a coronation ceremony. Supermodels were the sweethearts of popular culture, glossy magazine editors the power behind the throne. This imperial age of fashion was set in motion, with precision timing, by the January 1990 cover of British Vogue. Peter Lindbergh’s black-and-white portrait of Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz announced the dawn of the supermodel age, and was the starting pistol for a decade when fashion was the engine room of popular culture. For the next 10 years, the party rolled directly from the front row to the Groucho and on to the following morning’s front pages.
In Vogue: The 90s is a six-part Disney+ retrospective of a decade that had it all. The magic of the 1990s is that it was both deluxe and delinquent, and one of the delights of this show is its candid footage of the era’s nights out. We see Liam Gallagher, radiating free bar energy as he swaggers through an after party, Liz Hurley serving bombshell in her Versace safety pin dress, her smile widening as the flashbulbs pop. Everyone smokes Marlboro Lights and tumbles out of black cabs wearing Louboutin heels.
The alchemy is in the precarious dance between glamour and grunge, between the rarefied and the raffish. This was the decade that spanned Kurt Cobain in a moth-eaten cardigan and Puff Daddy – as he was then – in a white fur coat. On the catwalk, it ricocheted from the apple-pie wholesomeness of the early supermodel era to Marc Jacobs’ iconic grunge collection and Tom Ford’s raunchy reign at Gucci. It was the moment when the Hollywood red carpet injected sex appeal into the once sleepy world of award ceremonies, but when actresses still got dressed in whatever they felt like, rather than what they were contracted to wear.
The 1990s were brilliant. I should know – I am old enough to have had a ringside seat. I hung out with Take That in Miami, was a guest at one of Jennifer Lopez’s weddings, and accompanied Tracey Emin to Paris fashion week. But 90s nostalgia is strong among those who weren’t even born at the time. The hottest gigs of 2025 are the return of Oasis, 29 years after their iconic Knebworth dates. In their baggy jeans, cropped tops, cycling shorts, baseball caps and scrunchies, most of generation Z have taken their wardrobe directly from the 1990s.
In Vogue: The 90s tells the story of how glossy magazines – not just Vogue itself, but the Face and i-D – became the papers of record for popular culture. Edward Enninful, who was fashion director of i-D while still a teenager, tells the story of how London, with its stellar fashion colleges and outrageous club scene, became the centre of the fashion world, with Lee McQueen as ringmaster and Kate Moss as muse. There are interviews with two titans of American Vogue, the styling legends Grace Coddington and Tonne Goodman; with charming Hamish Bowles, national treasure of British fashion and the host of a podcast from which the idea for this series grew, who has returned to the industry after suffering a serious stroke two years ago; and some marvellously entertaining cameos by the legendary fashion editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, a Gallic Cruella de Vil in leopard print, who gleefully recalls the tantrums and tiaras of fashion’s most wayward era.
But even in an all-star cast which includes Kim Kardashian, Naomi Campbell, Tom Ford, Gwyneth Paltrow and Baz Luhrmann, there is no doubt as to who is the star of In Vogue: the 90s. As Goodman puts it with signature crispness: “Vogue is Anna and Anna is Vogue.” Wintour is the Logan Roy of this world. The supporting cast of stylists and proteges are cast in the roles of Connor, Kendall, Roman and Shiv. The tone is set early on, when a voice off camera politely requests Wintour remove her signature sunglasses for an interview. The crisp flatness which with she declines, secure in the knowledge that her word is gospel, reflects the absolute power which Wintour wields throughout the Vogue empire.
Wintour’s influence on popular culture has extended way beyond fashion. She invented an archetype – “a chic, strong boss woman,” as Kim Kardashian puts it – which became a blueprint for women in the spotlight. From Kardashian herself, to Gwyneth Paltrow and Victoria Beckham, many of the most successful women of subsequent generations have borrowed from her playbook in which a feminine wardrobe is offset by a coolly aloof emotional tone which feels more patrician than maternal. The secret of how Wintour’s personal power has endured – even as the power of once all-important glossy magazines has crumbled around her – is an enigma that remains hidden behind those dark glasses.
The show is an X-ray of the power dynamics of fashion and a cardiograph of the swinging pendulum of popular culture. It tracks the prevailing winds of the decade as they switch direction from the perfection-idolising supermodel fever of the beginning of the decade, to the Perry Ellis “grunge” collection which scandalised New York fashion week in 1992. Wintour makes no bones about the fact that she detested grunge, but as Marc Jacobs says, “no force on earth” – for which read, not even Anna – “can stop an idea whose time has come.” Yet just two years later we see Amber Valletta opening Tom Ford’s Gucci show in a mostly unbuttoned silk blouse and velvet hipsters, a moment she recalls as a “sonic wave” of sexual energy. The ever-wry Ford observes, of the whiplash switch from grunge to glamour, that “you can only be depressed for so long”.
“So much happened in the 90s that determined where we are now in fashion,” observes Goodman. “As Anna says, the 90s really changed our world. The affront of hip-hop and grunge opened our eyes to the critical relevance of fashion in culture – and we welcomed every eye-opener.” The 1990s were, indeed, a great time to be alive. Nostalgia has never looked so good.
