Why Fashion Still Loves the ’90s—and What to Do About It

Ten years ago, at the launch of Vogue Runway, we published a series of articles about the ’90s. Sarah Mower contributed a piece on the lasting impact of Helmut Lang, Lynn Yaeger penned an ode to grunge, and Luke Leitch shared his recollections of the decade’s menswear (shout-out for warehouse-sale Maharishi!). In 2015, fashion’s pre-internet years looked novel and fresh, and revisiting them felt illuminating.

It was simple math, Mower argued at the time: “All you do is take today’s date, 2015, and subtract 25 (the age of today’s rising designers). Result: 1990, of course!” Somewhere between then and now, though, nostalgia has become not just a passing fancy, but a de facto mode of being in fashion (and the world). A quick survey of the fall 2025 trends includes both 1980s Working Girl chic and aughts-era indie sleaze. But the ’90s reign supreme, and with incoming creative directors at Gucci, Versace, and Maison Margiela, three brands at their It-iest in those years, the ’90s aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

A look from Alessandro Michele’s Gucci women’s debut, for fall 2015, when the ’90s revival felt fresh.

Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com

The fall 1996 Tom Ford for Gucci look that inspired it.

Photo: Condé Nast Archive

No doubt, the heritage-brand system is at the root of what feels like a perma-stasis. If brand codes were established in the ’90s, it is reinterpretations and revivals of the ’90s that we shall see. But it’s equally a phenomenon of the internet itself, Pinterest and Tumblr included. As Kurt Andersen, writing in Vanity Fair in 2011, argued, “Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.”

Indeed, as revisiting old forms took hold in other parts of culture—sequels begat prequels, the 1970s breakups of Fleetwood Mac members became Broadway musicals and TV miniseries in the 2020s—the formula has become more explicit in fashion. The year 2018 saw reeditions at both Versace, where Donatella marked the 20th anniversary of her brother Gianni’s death by going back to the archives, and Marc Jacobs, where, 25 years after his agenda-shifting grunge show for Perry Ellis, the designer introduced a Grunge Redux collection.

At Donatella Versace’s spring 2018 Versace show, she pulled directly from the archives, focusing on the years 1991–95; it was the first time she did so at the brand.

Photo: Alessandro Garofalo / Indigital.tv