Why are we drawn ceaselessly back into the ever-more-recent past? The 1990s trend has been building for years now, with bucket hats, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy chic, Oasis reunions and documentaries about Oasis reunions… There are clearly deep reasons to revisit that decade. Some have scores to settle (Earl Spencer), while Gen Z’s interest seems tinged with yearning – as well as prurient curiosity about how barbaric it all was.

It was the twilight of the Yellow Pages, the last days of video. You were nobody without a landline, nowhere without an A-Z. It was a time of libertinism, it was a time of HIV. Of ecstasy (the drug) and agony (Gazza cried, Diana died). The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain guides us carefully into this distant land. ‘Culture was consumed in physical, analogue form, often socially,’ writes the director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson, as if he were an anthropologist and the 1990s an uncontacted tribe.

The art endures, but the fashion content feels like old magazine junk

The art endures, but the fashion content feels like old magazine junk

I have also been immersed in the period, writing a novel about a fictional group of 1990s artists living in Headless Yard, east London. They don’t mind the grottiness of their shared warehouse – to them it is an idyll of creativity. The 1990s recession brought cheap rents, and room to think big. The swaggering artists I made up are hedonistic, but sincere. They want their work to last.

The Tate Britain show provides a chance to see how the art of that decade is holding up. Curated by Edward Enninful, it’s his highly personal, politicised take; as a former editor of Vogue, he controls the fashion narrative tightly. But the YBA........

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