When my friends asked me to write about my favourite decade, the ‘90s came to mind instantly and exclusively. Don’t ask why. There are a million reasons why, some of which I’ll get into here on this Bad at Math issue. And just as there are a million reasons, there are a million things to include: the most iconic designer collections (where does one even begin?), legendary art photographers, unforgettable magazine covers, the music, the movies, the pop punk culture, the interiors. It’s overwhelming. To keep myself from spiraling into a nostalgic black hole, I’ve decided to approach this blog by writing down the first things that come to mind when I hear “the nineties.” Because, for whatever reason, the things that rise to the surface first are usually the ones that matter most; subconsciously, emotionally, maybe even aesthetically. And that’s probably why I love them the most.
-Alexandra
The designers
For me, the ‘90s were fashion’s peak. Full stop. It was the era of runway as immersive theatre, designers as artists, and campaigns that made you feel something. Fashion wasn’t chasing relevance, it was the culture. Martin at Margiela, Tom Ford at Gucci, Vivienne doing Vivienne, Yohji turning silhouettes into statements, everyone was in their prime. Now Gucci has Demna. Margiela is not Margiela. Helmut Lang sells sweaters and trades on nostalgia. Creative directors are exchanged by price tag, not point of view. The authenticity is long gone (well, unless we’re talking about 2WO+1NE=2 and a few other exceptions). And the story goes on.
Jil Sander
In the ‘90s, minimalism arrived as a necessary cleanse after the maximalism of the '80s. Clean lines. Ribbed turtlenecks. Ghostly fabrics. And right in the center of it all: Jil Sander. Her name became shorthand for intelligent dressing: a perfectly cut pantsuit, a cashmere V-neck that worked like punctuation, a white shirt that needed no explanation.
Jil established a mindset. She understood that elegance could be quiet, and that simplicity didn’t mean boring. Her work shaped the kind of minimalism that wasn’t just clean-lined but meaningful. The kind that only gets better with time. That’s what happens when you design from principle, not trend. Long before we started calling it “quiet luxury,” Jil Sander was doing it. And the fact that it still feels relevant? That’s the point.
Martin Margiela
Where do you start with Martin Margiela? I don’t know! Because trying to “sum up” Margiela is like trying to explain a dream while you’re still waking up. But fine — let’s keep it short (for now).
Margiela made fashion that didn’t just reject the system, it exposed it. Literally. Garments turned inside out, seams on full display, tags intentionally blank. A vest stitched in the shape of a plastic shopping bag. In 1989 he debuted his interpretation of tabi boots on the runway. He covered his models in red paint so the tabi footprint would stand out on the white catwalk. “I thought the audience should notice the new footwear. And what would be more evident than a footprint.”
While his peers were secretly lifting from vintage, Martin went to flea markets, disassembled forgotten garments, reconstruct them into something new, and credited the original. Radical honesty as design ethos.
He was conceptual without trying to be clever. For A/W92, the pinstripes and prints of the garments were painted onto the bodies of the models resulting in a trompe l’oeil effect, the clothing looking as if its patterns had somehow leaked onto the skin, the barriers between fashion and the body made permeable. He treated fashion as sculpture, but worn. As performance, but intimate. He left space for interpretation, for obsession, for mythology.
And that’s exactly what he became: a myth. No interviews. No appearances. No finale bow. Just the work. Always the work. He stepped away in 2008, which still feels like the worst kind of heartbreak. But maybe that’s the point too, that Martin never overstayed. He left before we could get too comfortable. And that’s why we’re still not over him.
Ann Demeulemeester
In the male-dominated fashion landscape of the 1980s, Ann Demeulemeester emerged as a distinct voice. She was one of only two women in the now-iconic Antwerp Six—a group of Belgian designers, including Martin Margiela, who gained attention after driving to London in 1986 to present their collections during Fashion Week. Though all trained at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, their styles diverged sharply. What connected them was a shared intent: to challenge and redefine the fashion status quo.
Ann Demeulemeester: “I’m preoccupied with volume, larger, looser, but in a very erotical way. I try to cut a certain sensual movement into the clothes, a casual spirit, as if something is blown apart by the wind.”
London was a jolt. Demeulemeester remembers turning on the TV and seeing the Sex Pistols, and everything shifted. That moment of cultural whiplash stuck - punk, grunge, chaos - and it seeped into her work. Her runway soundtracks would later feature Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth.
Her Spring/Summer '97 collection marked a turning point. Models walked out in loose, off-shoulder drapes that felt like classical sculpture—equal parts strength and surrender. No body-con. No gloss. Just a new kind of sensuality. Her clothes never tried to steal attention. They were introverted. Anti-uniform, in a way that still feels radical.
Demeulemeester’s clothes tell their own stories, through sharp tailoring, delicate distressing, poetic detail. Her genderless silhouettes blurred the line between menswear and womenswear long before that became a trend. Most designers would stall out working in a near-constant palette of black and white. Not her. She turned minimalism into language. She played with tone and texture; shadows, sheens, and the occasional jolt of blood red or washed-out blue. “If you look at a black and white picture,” she said, “everything you need to explain a silhouette, a contrast, a mood, is there. It’s the essence.”
Issey Miyake
And so I’m closing out this slightly obsessive ’90s tribute with the designer who I, perhaps, love the most: Issey Miyake. Over seven decades, he built one of the most radical legacies in fashion, changing the entire framework. He made tech feel poetic, and sustainability feel like common sense before it had a name.
His clothes worked like origami and wore like air. In the ’80s, he patented a heat-pressing technique that gave us those permanent, sculptural pleats. By ’93, it had its own line. Pleats Please was a whole thesis on movement, comfort, and function disguised as elegance. Miyake didn’t believe in fashion for fashion’s sake; he wanted it to be beautiful, but also wearable, practical, accessible.
And because Miyake was always ten steps ahead, he brought in artists to collaborate. Between ’96 and ’98, he worked with four, including (my other beloved one) Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki’s boudoir photography was raw, erotic, sometimes unsettling, and completely unlike anything you’d associate with technical fabrics. But Miyake made it make sense.
“The tailoring of clothes is determined by the body.” — Issey Miyake
My ‘90s-inspired outfits
I didn’t even try to “compose” my three ’90s-inspired looks. They just happened. This is basically how I always dress, with minimal shapes, clean lines, monochromatic tones, and gentle textures. The palette stayed in character; beige, silver-grey, and black. Nothing to overthink.
First up was the Death Of Leichhardt dress, a cotton-tencel maxi that clings in all the right places. Spaghetti straps, button front, the kind of cutout detail that feels legally trademarked by the late ’90s. It’s the kind of dress you put on and suddenly you’re the main character in a Calvin Klein campaign shot on film.
Look 2 was my personal version of a Jil Sander’s Guinevere van Seenus-in-SS96 daydream: if you know, you know. A total black outfit built around the Figure with Scales tank (silk-viscose), tucked into wide-leg cool wool Πάνορμος trousers. I added a black leather belt to cinch my waist.
Both looks got the same finish: strappy black sandals and rectangular black sunglasses. No jewellery, no layering, no distractions.
For a nighty night, I slipped into a maxi slinky silk slip dress. The kind of dress Kate Moss wore to literally everything in the ’90s, from industry events to after-show parties. Mine had an elongated fringe detail, which felt like an accidental tribute to those weirdly useless thin scarves everyone wore then (you remember). I added on a silver cuff and called it a night. Only thing missing? My silver heeled sandals.
The music
Goo is Sonic Youth’s sixth studio album, released in the summer of 1990 (I wasn’t even born yet). The album featured the single "Kool Thing" on which Public Enemy's Chuck D made a guest appearance. The soundstage is rich, with clear separation between instruments. It’s Sonic Youth at their best!
The magazines
RAY GUN: The Bible of Music & Style
Ray Gun was the most eye-catching, explorative and downright irreverent magazine of ’90s American publishing. Born in a one-bedroom Malibu apartment in 1992, it became the bible for anyone who thought Rolling Stone felt like their dad’s idea of cool. Think Sonic Youth, Björk, Bowie on the covers; Missy Elliott, Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop in the pages — all distorted, loud, and deliberately hard to read.
Founder Marvin Scott Jarrett wanted to make something weird and real, inspired by the British music mags he grew up on; The Face, NME, the rawness of UK sound. So he launched Ray Gun for the kids who wanted Blur and Jarvis Cocker, not Bon Jovi. Visually, it was anarchy. Art director David Carson turned design into noise: upside-down pages, back-to-front spreads, even a Bryan Ferry interview printed entirely in Dingbats. No one could read it, but that was kind of the point. Jarrett called it authentic. It was. Punk, loud, and visually unhinged.
THE FACE: The almanac of cool
Launched on May 1, 1980, The Face was a full cultural reset. Ex-NME editor Nick Logan poured his and his wife’s life savings into it, and the result was a monthly bible of what mattered in fashion, music, and youth culture.
It gave us everything: British subcultures, rising underground sounds, and the first glimpses of now-iconic photographers like Juergen Teller, Nick Knight, Corinne Day, and Elaine Constantine, all wrapped in Neville Brody’s bold, rule-breaking design. Yes, it looked good. But it also said something. The Face introduced the UK to MDMA and Chicago house, but also ran award-winning stories on child soldiers in Somalia. It was unpredictable in the best way.
One of The Face’s most iconic moments: the “3rd Summer of Love” editorial, July 1990. Corinne Day behind the camera. Camber Sands as the backdrop. Kate Moss (pre-fame) in a feathered headdress, looking like a feral fairy just landed from a parallel rave dimension. The energy was loose. Joyful. Melanie Ward styled the shoot and put Kate in Birkenstocks, which, at the time, was kind of radical. Not “fashion” yet. Just functional.
The photography
Corinne Day
At that time, in a flat above Brewer Street in Soho, neon bleeding in from the Raymond Revuebar sign across the way, Corinne Day was quietly reinventing fashion photography. The space doubled as home and studio — she and her partner, filmmaker Mark Szaszy, living in what was technically not even a residential building. It was raw. It was real. And it gave us the '90s as we now visually remember them.
Day shot Soho not like an outsider with a brief, but like someone who belonged, who knew the back stairwells and the texture of the light. She used her friends instead of models, worked with what she had, and stripped fashion of its gloss. That gritty glamour, shot lo-fi and unfiltered, made stars out of new faces like Kate Moss and Rosemary Ferguson — and rattled an industry that wasn’t quite ready for real skin and undone hair. They called it “heroin chic” (clumsy, controversial) but what Day was doing had nothing to do with trends or provocation. It was about truth.
Photos from England’s Dreaming, a 1993 editorial styled by Melanie Ward for The Face, were shot in Corinne Day’s flat — beer-stained carpet, worn-out sofa, no set dressing. Rosemary Ferguson wears shiny vinyl trousers against the lived-in mess of real life. Day met Ferguson in a McDonald’s in 1991. She looked androgynous. Day was intrigued. “I found myself attracted to her in a way that I had never looked at a girl before,” she later wrote. She photographed her at home, broke, still on the dole, not thinking about commercial appeal. “I was having too much of a good time.”
The interiors
I’m obsessed with 90s modernist interiors. Specifically, those Manhattan lofts that look like someone designed them while listening to Philip Glass on loop. Wide open space. No colour. Furniture that feels more like punctuation than comfort. Black, white, silver. Glass instead of walls. Natural light everywhere. Geometry in charge.
The rooms are all stainless steel and sharp edges. The chairs, more like sculptures than actual seats. Nothing’s soft, but somehow the space feels calm — like stepping into a gallery you secretly want to live in.
Patrick Bateman’s apartment in American Psycho is my reference point. Clinical, exact, iconic. The Hill House chair by Mackintosh against a stencilled wall. The Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe, front and center like a throne. The Alanda coffee table by Paolo Piva — all lines and presence. Even the art says something. Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities flanks the stereo: suits in mid-collapse, tension dressed in tailoring. A quiet nod to the chaos under the surface. It’s cold. It’s perfect. I want to move in.
Anyway, speaking of Bauhaus interiors, you can click here to time travel 60 years back.
The cinema
Speaking of Patrick Bateman, the conversation naturally shifts to my favourite topic: movies. And of course, I mean ’90s movies. So here are my top six picks.
Irma Vep (1996)
Hong Kong action diva Maggie Cheung comes to France to star in a chaotic remake of the silent classic Les Vampires, directed by a washed-up auteur who may or may not be losing his mind. She doesn’t speak French. No one seems entirely sure what movie they’re making. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays a version of Jean-Luc Godard. Everyone thinks he’s done, a relic, unhinged, totally irrelevant. And then they see his film. It's genius. Untouchable. Cheung becomes Irma Vep, but also becomes Cheung becoming Irma Vep. She paces hotel hallways, climbs rooftops in the rain, ghosting through Paris like a latex-clad phantom. Irma Vep might be the sharpest film ever made about filmmaking itself.
Bound (1996)
A slick erotic thriller with a plot that actually delivers and chemistry that could short-circuit the grid. Sparks fly the second Violet spots Corky in a Chicago elevator. Violet’s dating Caesar — a paranoid mobster with too much money and too many guns. Corky just got out of prison and is renovating the apartment next door. What starts as a glance turns into a full-blown affair, and then (because women multitask) a meticulous plan to steal mob money and get Violet out. When studios read the script, they told the Wachowskis they'd greenlight it if Corky were a man. The siblings passed, saying, “That movie’s been made a million times. We’re not interested.” And thank God, because this one hadn’t.
Run Lola Run (1998)
EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY YOU’RE FACED WITH A DECISION THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
This movie kind of feels like my life: sprinting between tasks, doubling back, wishing I could rewind time and do the exact same thing — just better. Set in ’90s Berlin, Lola gets a call from her boyfriend, Manni. He lost 100,000 Deutsche Marks on a subway — money that belongs to someone you don’t want to disappoint. She has 20 minutes to find it before he does something incredibly stupid, like rob a store. The story plays out three different ways, depending on tiny, blink-and-you-miss-them changes. A dog barks. A woman crosses the street. And suddenly the whole day reshapes itself. The ambulance crashing through the glass is cinema gold. The butterfly effect is at the heart of it — how the tiniest moments can detonate everything. Whether Manni was worth the effort? Still unclear.
Fallen Angels (1995)
In case I haven’t already told you: I’m a Wong Kar-wai girl. Fallen Angels is his fifth film — messy, moody, neon-lit, and steeped in the emotional detachment of a whole generation. A hitman wants out. His handler is in love with him. No one can say what they mean, so they spiral in silence. Meanwhile, a mute ex-con (Takeshi Kaneshiro) zooms through Hong Kong on a Yamaha, with a devilishly sexy Michelle Reis clinging to him like a ghost in leather — later grinding on a jukebox to Laurie Anderson. Everyone’s looking for connection. Nobody knows how to ask for it. That motorbike scene has become a staple of Wong Kar-wai’s iconography — right up there with pink rubber gloves, pineapple cans, and toy planes. And now: Marianne Faithfull humming Go Away From My World while two people pretend they’re not in love. Sexy. Sad. Iconic.
Dead Man (1995)
It was only a matter of time before Johnny Depp (my since forever crush) made his way into this blog. A ’90s icon, hotter than language can capture. And Dead Man is one of his most quietly brilliant performances. Directed by Jim Jarmusch, the film reimagines the American West as a bleak, poetic wasteland. Johnny plays William Blake, an accountant who arrives in a town called Machine and quickly finds himself wounded, wanted, and wandering. He’s taken in by Nobody, an outcast who becomes both guide and witness as Blake stumbles through a spiritual unraveling. Shot in austere black-and-white by Robby Müller and layered with a raw, electric score by Neil Young, Dead Man moves like a fever dream. Violence, industrial decay, and mortality blur into something haunting, slow, surreal, and unforgettable.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)
1992 was a landmark year. I was born. And David Lynch released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Obviously, my beloved Laura had to make this ’90s film roundup. By now, the premise is legend: In the questionable town of Deer Meadow, FBI Agent Desmond vanishes while investigating the murder of a teenage girl. No killer, no closure. Agent Cooper shows up, and after experiencing dark visions and supernatural encounters, he chillingly predicts that the culprit will claim another life. Meanwhile, in the more cozy town of Twin Peaks, hedonistic beauty Laura Palmer hangs with lowlifes and seems destined for a grisly fate. Fire Walk With Me is not a standalone film. It’s the emotional backbone of the entire Twin Peaks universe. The correct order matters — Season 1, then Season 2, then the film, then Season 3 (released casually 25 years later, because David Lynch does what he wants).
Guest Star: David Bowie :)