The Guardian view on the 90s revival: the end of the analogue age | Editorial
The new exhibition at Tate Britain is part of a wider cultural resurgence from 30 years ago. This is nostalgia for a pre-digital era
Each generation imagines itself to be cooler than the one that went before it, and weirder than the one that comes after it, to update George Orwell. Gen X is no exception. “It felt like something was happening,” Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker writes in the catalogue for The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opened at Tate Britain this week. “Something good. It felt like the weirdos were taking over.”
The exhibition, curated by the former editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, is part of a wider 90s cultural revival. Oasis’s Wonderwall was the UK’s unofficial World Cup anthem this summer, after last year’s sellout reunion tour. Pulp have also just completed a world tour. The 1993 novel Trainspotting has become a musical; less surprisingly, so has 90s-set romance One Day, which found a new audience with 2024’s Netflix series. Love Story, which fictionalises the doomed relationship between John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette, broke streaming records. Cult drama This Life is now on iPlayer. Vogue has described the era as “fashion’s most revisited decade”.
