90s Fashion!

(For women, to be specific. Like I follow men’s fashion.)

Those who think 90s women’s fashion was all crop tops, wide-legged jeans, butterfly hair clips, and Spice Girl-style platform shoes probably got their 90s fashion history from a Tumblr on vintage Delia’s catalogs and that’s it. As someone who owns many issues of Vogue, Elle, W, and Bazaar from 1990 to the December 1999 issues, I can safely say there’s way more to 90s fashion than that. There were traces of the 80s from the early 90s (top left pic), peak grunge and dowdy realness from 1992-1993 (top right pic), a short but memorable shot of disco glam to get rid of the grunge in 1994 (bottom left pic), hip-hop influences and retro comebacks in the mid-90s, and minimalism and nightclub-inspired attire in the late 90s (bottom right pic).

Fashion in the 90s truly had it ALL, but, more remarkably, designers placed more quality and creativity into their collections. That decade also gave us landmarks collections, such as John Galliano’s Spring 1995 (I know JG is a dubious mofo but his clothes for that season were just wow), or Tom Ford for Gucci’s Fall 1995. What happened to moments like that? Nowadays, a fashion moment involves an overpriced plain t-shirt from some fast fashion label that went viral on TikTok because some celeb wore that shirt. Yawn.