Originally published in Spook magazine.
The grunge fashion photography of the 1990s was the real #IWokeUpLikeThis. Messy-haired girls lounged around in slouchy jumpers and underwear, surrounded by drained coffee cups and fashion magazines. The wallpaper was peeling, the light was flat; everything was bedraggled and in disarray. These were definitely not the glossy, Amazonian supermodels of the 80s. Their faces were pale, their makeup smudged. And they just couldn’t care less.
This was a new kind of glamour – one based on imperfection and grittiness. Suddenly, beauty was about realness, following the moody peaks and lulls of grunge music. The idea was to be effortless, or at least look like it. The way Marc Jacobs described it, “The ideal girl will just sort of roll out of bed some night after taking a nap and put on a slip and go out to some club or go dancing or something. She’d be all dressed, but she’d still be kind of undressed… and she wouldn’t have to do anything else.”
The swelling 90s-nostalgia we’re experiencing everywhere right now is fine by me. Everyone has that decade they ache for, and it’s always plagued me terribly that I was born in the late 80s, too late to be a part of all this. By the time I was old enough to be discover the allure of Nirvana and Doc Martins – to realise that subcultures exist, that there were other people who felt as dislocated and despairing as me – grunge was long dead. Being a gloomy, black-nailed teenager in 2004 just somehow wasn’t as cool.
So when I heard there was a new documentary coming out devoted to 90s fashion it felt like Christmas. Loïc Prigent’s Fashion in the 1990s (La mode des années 90) is showing now at ACMI as part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival. It’s a joyful #TBT to all the diverse and shambolic trends of the decade, from grunge to bling to just plain bad taste. Charmingly put together in that very 90s homemade aesthetic, it mashes up archival footage of fashion shows and interviews with the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier, Style.com’s Tim Blanks and French Vanity Faireditor Anne Boulay. It’s fun and playful and nostalgic, and as a 90s fashion 101 primer, it delivers. What it doesn’t do, really, is look at what it all meant.
In the 90s, typical glamour was stripped away and dirtied up. Glamour, in its original sense, has always meant a kind of sheen and untouchability. Now that was gone, leaving the ordinary and strung-out. There was a thirst for authenticity, for rawness. It was in Kurt Cobain’s ravaged screams: “Here we are now – entertain us.” It was in the griminess of films like Kids and Trainspotting. And it was in the slips, biker jackets and stompy boots on the streets.
From the roughed-up streetwear of Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui, to the deconstructionist creativity of Comme Des Garcons and Martin Margiela, to the avant-garde visions of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, there was an obsession with everything dark and ripped-up and decaying. In a lot of ways, it was about finding beauty in ugliness.
To me, what’s most alluring about this idea of beauty is the concept of messiness. For a girl to be messy – physically and emotionally – makes people uncomfortable – it goes against what femininity is supposed to be. Good girls are expected to stay neatly within the lines, polished and placid and always predictable. These girls, with their disheveled hair, days-old makeup and ripped stockings represented a kind of femininity that was allowed to be angry and sad and bored and complicated; it owned all those ugly and possibly crazy feelings we’re supposed to hide. Their fears and desires were exposed – and that’s always unnerving to people.
Female sexuality is messy too. The best fashion designers of the 90s explored that idea with verve, bringing the body into focus. Dresses were slashed away to expose breasts on the runway; models wore sheer tops with nothing underneath. Underwear became outwear, drawing attention to skin and curves. In Jean Paul Gaultier’s signature cone bras and elaborate corsetry, the female body became provocative and potently sensual. In Alexander McQueen’s gothic armor, it had an element of fierceness: “I want people to fear the women I dress,” he said. In the simple black tank tops and underwear of Calvin Klein, it was that very effortlessness that made women sexy.
A lot of this was embodied in a skinny teenage girl called Kate. At the end of 1989, experimental fashion photographer Corinne Day was rummaging through the ‘maybe drawer’ at a London modelling agency, looking for girls ordinary enough that they might work on her shoots for free. As Maureen Callahan describes in her book Champagne Supernovas, Day pulled out a snapshot of a short, flat-chested girl – hair hanging in strings, her teeth crooked, her face bare and pale. When she asked who this girl was, the booker studied it for a while. “Um… I think that’s Kate Moss,” she said.
Obviously, it’s ridiculous now to be talking about Kate Moss’s beauty as being subversive. But this wasn’t the glossed-up, grown-up Kate Moss we know today, and at the time, the fashion world definitely wasn’t used to a girl like her. Fifteen-year-old Kate was the antithesis of the shiny 80s supermodels, with her beat up boots, thrift shop style and ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude. But Day’s black-and-white photos of her on a cold British beach – wrinkling her nose, grinning wide with those jagged teeth, hair messed up from the wind – made it to the cover of The Face in 1990. There was something fresh and authentic about her, and it captivated Calvin Klein, then Marc Jacobs, and John Galliano, and then the rest of the world. And suddenly, the imperfect was chic.
Kate was a rough little diamond, but it wasn’t just her. Non-models with unusual features like Chloe Sevigny and Sophia Coppola started appearing in fashion campaigns. Jean Paul Gaultier sought out girls like Sudanese model Alek Wek, Spanish actress Rossy de Palma (who, with her sharp and asymmetrical features has been described as “a Picasso come to life”) and Eve Salvail, probably the only model to get away with flaunting a shaved head and tattooed skull.
You could argue that imperfection as a trend is still a trend, and therefore restrictive and fake or whatever. Considering one of the most common criticisms of the fashion industry though is its tendency to celebrate narrow definitions of beauty, whenever those definitions are challenged, there’s something interesting happening. When being different and complex is seen as beautiful, it’s hard to deny that’s pretty cool.
I have a way of romanticising things, and admittedly I am attracted to a darker aesthetic in any kind of art. To be clear, in admiring these fashion images I have no intention of glamourising drug use. It’s true that some the work of photographers like Corinne Day and Davide Sorrenti was problematic in that sense. The term ‘heroin chic’ caught on, and though some of the outrage was overblown, there was a very real point there: making drugs look sexy isn’t cool.
The darkest examples definitely took it too far. Some of those girls looked sick, and some of them probably were, and it’s no secret that some of the designers and photographers themselves were seriously messed up. I do wonder though, if the idea was less about promoting self-destruction than trying to expose the pain and grapple with what it meant, in the same way that art, film and literature were doing. It’s like what music journalist Jon Savage said about grunge in The Face in 1997: “Nirvana brought darkness into light but this is a dangerous occupation. People don’t associate you with the therapeutic function of exposing the shadow; they associate you with that shadow.”
Fashion images usually work by making us feel a lack, projecting a fantasy of a desired self that invites us to imagine ourselves in a more glamorous life. Now we have reality TV, which works by packaging up the shiniest, most ridiculous simulacrum of reality, and letting us pretend the Kardashians have anything to do with our lives. In these gritty, stripped-back images though, we’re confronted with something more uncomfortably familiar – the messiness and longing of the real. Obviously, they’re just as carefully constructed as more luxurious images, but they still manage capture the essence of something we can recognise and feel ourselves. We’re not all that sure how to respond to it, and that can be harrowing. And that’s what gives it its power.