Reflecting on how the 1990s transformed London’s cultural landscape by breaking down boundaries between fashion, art, music and street culture, we examine ZOOs role as an East London pioneer that embraced this experimentation and embodied its “Day One” philosophy of discovering what was next before everyone else.
Author:
David - Lead Buyer & Curator at ZOO Fashions
Expertise: Designer Intent, Shifting Luxury Paradigms and Investment Curation. With over two decades of securing ZOO’s Day 1 brand accounts, David curates collections by identifying the designers who dictate the cultural zeitgeist, bridging the gap between high-fashion tailoring and street-level subversion.
There is something slightly amusing about watching the 1990s being rediscovered by a new generation. Like all cyclical movements the decade has become in vogue again - the clothes are back, the early digital photos are back, the music is back and somewhat of the attitude has also made a comeback. It is no surprise then that appropriately the TATE Britain has decided to put it all under one roof.
The 90s: Art and Fashion, opening at Tate Britain on October 8th, brings together almost seventy artists, photographers and designers and more than one hundred works to reconsider a decade that transformed British cultural identity. Curated by Edward Enninful, it showcases names as diverse as Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili and many others.
On paper it’s an exhibition about a decade, but for those of us who were actually there, it is something more significant…It is a reminder.
The 1990s weren't simply about ‘fashion’, they were a turning point, a timestamp about what happened when the walls between things started coming down.
Art started talking to fashion, fashion started talking to music, music started talking to photography and photography started defining fashion. Clubs became galleries, magazines became cultural manifestos, designers became celebrities and models became cultural figures. Everything intersected and the city of London in its raw, imperfect, occasionally chaotic state became one of the most exciting places in the world, with ZOO bang smack in the middle.
Selling it. Wearing it. Living it, and, in our own East London way, helping shape it.
The phrase Cool Britannia has in time become a convenient shorthand for the decade evoking images of Tony Blair and New Labour optimism, Britpop, Ladettes, Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen, the list goes on. It makes for a neat and tidy story.
Yet the nineties were far from neat and Enninful himself has been careful to resist that version. Speaking on the period, he describes London in 1990 as raw, unstable and full of possibility. What defined the period for him wasn't one movement, but an overarching energy with a refusal of hierarchy and a belief that new voices could be heard across art, fashion, music and image-making.
That sentiment feels much closer to the truth for those who lived it. Before the mainstream media coined their cheesy catchphrase and it was co-opted for political gain, the youth were already in the deep end.
They were in clubs, print media, squats and studios, fashion stores and record shops. Creativity was rampant, things were being made just because, no business plan or intent to splash across a social media grid. There was just the intent and the work with a belief that if you made something good enough, somebody might notice.
This distinction was critical because without the internet, discovery was physical. you had to go somewhere, meet someone, open a magazine, find the store and know who to ask. And sometimes, if you were lucky you found yourself walking through the the doors of ZOO.
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As we illustrated in the earlier volume of the Manifesto, the 90s didn't emerge from the ether. The man walking into ZOO at the beginning of the decade had already spent the previous ten years learning.
The excess of the 80s had taught him what was possible. Restraint and proportion from the Japanese designers, luxury from the Italians and Belgians had taught us all to question convention. This growth wasn’t just a yearning for more products but more an understanding of lines, fabrics and silhouettes. They wanted to be more informed and this was happening everywhere.
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The Japanese quartet were fundamental in the 90s. Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons and Matsuda. Their importance to ZOO's development cannot be overstated, as they taught us that we could build our own fashion language, which plugged directly into London’s generation of young designers who were doing exactly that. Circling the disruption, theatre and provocation of Vivienne Westwood, Galliano and McQueen the wider ecosystem was developing. Photography became part of the fashion language and fundamental to the culture, stripping away polish, embracing imperfection and pushing fashion imagery into something closer to art.
The Tate exhibition recognises that connection explicitly, placing photography, art and fashion together rather than treating them as separate disciplines. For ZOO, that wasn't a theoretical proposition, it was the environment that we were operating in.
As much as the ‘industry’ had begun to change, so had the street. No longer waiting for permission, everything from club culture, football and the rave scene were producing their own aesthetic and blurring boundaries that fashion's traditional institutions had created.
A man could wear C.P. Company to the club, a pair of Japanese trousers with trainers, Prada with a football jacket and Versace with something deliberately ordinary. Constructing your own fashion system was the remit and it was here that ZOO’s particular form of curation became increasingly important. We didn't want everyone to look the same, we wanted to show people how different the possibilities could be.
There was always a temptation to romanticise the people who came through the door once ZOO became established. The footballers, music artists, DJs and celebs whose names eventually appeared in magazine spreads or early reality TV. But it wasn’t these faces that really made ZOO. It was the local faces, the local hard nuts or kids who had saved for that jacket. Customers who had been coming since the 80s and the fashion obsessive who simply wanted to find something nobody else had. That mixture was ZOO. The meeting point for all tribes and inevitably those different tribes began to overlap.
Perhaps this is why the Tate exhibition feels particularly relevant to ZOO. Edward Enninful's exhibition isn't really telling us that the 1990s were cool, we already knew that. It’s actually posing the question as to why they became culturally consequential.
The exhibition brings together the visual language of the decade, photography, garments, painting, sculpture and film and places those things into the same conversation. The designers, models, photographers, iconic young British artists, the club culture, the grunge aesthetic, the deliberately imperfect image and importantly those voices that complicate the easy Cool Britannia narrative. Chris Ofili's No Woman, No Cry, for example, brings the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the experience of Doreen Lawrence into a decade too often remembered simply through its most photogenic moments.
That matters, because the 90s weren't simply about looking good. The facets of identity, visibility, class, race, gender, access and power took the forefront and who got to participate in the new Britain being created. Enninful speaks directly about this, describing his own experience as a young Black man finding space in environments that had not necessarily been built with him in mind and it is that which is a much more interesting story than nostalgia.
And somewhere within that complex weaving, there was ZOO.
East London, somewhat outside the accepted geography of British fashion. Not Bond Street or Knightsbridge or the Kings Road, but close enough to understand exactly what was happening and far enough away to develop our own point of view. ZOO had always been about bringing the world to East London.
Japanese design alongside Italian luxury with Parisian attitude and a touch of Belgian intellectualism layered amongst London street culture. It was a collision point which became increasingly exciting in the 90s. Customers would come in looking for something very specific and leave having discovered an entirely different designer. There was no method or convention. You came to a physical store, met the Zoo Keeper and his charges and had a conversation.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Tate exhibition arriving now is that the 90s have become distant enough to be seen differently. We can finally understand what they changed in our society. The merging of cultures, the politicisation of fashion and image as diversity emerged as a creative force. Traditional boundaries were collapsing and Enninful himself has described those developments as conditions that are still with us.
Look at fashion today. The designer is a creative director as the musician is a fashion collaborator. The footballer doubles as a style authority whilst the photographer is viewed as an artist. Brands become media companies, retailers publishers and individuals are now broadcasters. None of that appeared from nowhere. The foundations were laid in the 90s.
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This is where the ZOO story becomes relevant to the Tate story. The exhibition is looking back at a generation that created before consensus and it is this doctrine that has forever shaped the ZOO philosophy. Never particularly interested in waiting for everybody else to decide whether something is important, we wanted to know whether we thought it was important. It is this ethos that connected with all of the designers we have landed as a first - Yohji, Prada, Margiela and Gaultier. And it remains true today. The phrase we use now is Day One and it was borne out of a consistent instinct to see something way before the competition. It’s how we have bought, how we have curated and how we have built ZOO.
There is a danger with any retrospective, especially one that covers such as an explosive time period. Nostalgia tends to exist in the prism of rose tinted glasses and the past can often look cleaner than it actually was.
The photographs are better, the people look younger, the nights more glamorous. The uncertainty tends to be shined away, but that uncertainty was part of the magic. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. Enninful has spoken about the absence of social media as one of the freedoms of the period: people could experiment and grow without every mistake being instantly documented and judged.
That may be one of the most important differences between then and now. The 90s allowed people to disappear into culture. To experiment, fail, change and reinvent themselves to emerge somewhere completely different. Fashion and its culture needs that freedom yet it is the one thing that we may never get back.
Nevertheless, there is an irony in that the 90s have never completely disappeared, moreover they have became invisible because we live through their consequences.
Every time a designer collaborates across disciplines, there is a little bit of the 90s. Every time a streetwear label enters a luxury house, there is a little bit of the 90s. Every time a young designer refuses to respect the traditional hierarchy, there is a little bit of the 90s, and every time a customer walks into ZOO and says: “Show me something I haven't seen before.” there is a little bit of the 90s.
So, as Tate Britain opens its doors to revisit the decade, we will inevitably see the familiar faces but for us the real memory is slightly different. It is the customer walking through the door, the people who came in looking for one thing and left with another. The atmosphere and feeling that something was happening. That fashion, music and art mattered just that little bit more and that the person standing opposite you might know something you didn't
That was ZOO and that was the 90s. We were in the room, perhaps not the one everybody expected us to be in, but we were there. East London, watching, buying and curating and occasionally getting it right before everybody else. Which, when you think about it, is probably the most ZOO way of remembering the 90s. Not as history but as Day One, because the greatest thing about that decade wasn't that it was cool. It was that nobody knew it would become cool, and that's precisely why we loved it.
ZOO is the place to start. With roots in East London’s 90s fashion culture, ZOO has spent decades curating designers who challenged convention, from Japanese innovators and Italian luxury houses to the designers who shaped London’s underground fashion scene. The focus is on finding pieces with genuine design significance, not simply reproducing a 90s look.
ZOO’s heritage is closely connected to designers including Yohji Yamamoto, Prada, Maison Margiela, Jean Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake, alongside the wider generation of designers who transformed fashion during the decade. ZOO’s approach has always been to identify designers with a distinctive point of view and bring them to its customers early.
Rather than dressing head-to-toe in nostalgia, start with the principles that made 90s fashion important: strong silhouettes, Japanese design, Italian luxury, experimental tailoring and unexpected combinations. ZOO’s curation makes it possible to mix these influences with contemporary pieces, creating a wardrobe that captures the attitude of the 90s without simply copying it.
Because ZOO was there. The store wasn't looking back at the 90s, it was part of the culture as it happened, bringing Japanese, Italian, Belgian and Parisian design into East London and giving customers access to designers before they became universally recognised. That same instinct remains at the heart of ZOO today: discovering what matters before everyone else does.
For ZOO, it is about more than nostalgia. Look for design integrity, distinctive construction, quality fabrics, cultural relevance and a designer with a clear point of view. The best pieces from the era still feel relevant because they weren't designed simply to follow a trend. They represented a new way of thinking about fashion which is exactly why ZOO continues to curate them.
The 90s - We Were There. Art. Fashion. Music. Identity. London. And the decade that changed the rules.
we examine ZOOs role as an East London pioneer that embraced this experimentation and embodied its “Day One” philosophy of discovering what was next before everyone else.
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