Downtown’s towering buildings lighted up at night is a sight that still stops me short every time I make my way here, which, if I’m being honest, isn’t very often. Lately, it’s almost exclusively for events at ASU FIDM. Last month, it was the book signing with Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author Robin Givhan. Tonight, it’s the opening reception of an exhibit I’ve been anticipating for weeks. So much so that I told all of my friends — the ones I know truly appreciate fashion — to block the date off their calendars, stat, and join me. 

So, here we are. Outside by the courtyard, a live DJ is spinning ’90s anthems, while guests hover over platters of hors d’oeuvres. The crowd is a wonderful generational mix of students, industry insiders, longtime fashion lovers, and local scenesters. But before we partake of any drinks, appetizers, and tidbits, we decide to get a head start on the exhibit before more people roll in. First on display are two suits. One is a gray ensemble from 1950 by Christian Dior, who dominated the fashion world until his death in 1957. It’s an excellent articulation of the New Look’s wasp-waisted, feminine style, which restored a sense of hope and romance after the bleak, poverty-stricken war years.

Next to it stands a black suit by John Galliano, which he presented in 1995 on a snow-dusted rooftop of a warehouse near Paris’s Pigalle district. By then, Galliano was already one of the buzziest rising stars in the industry; this show only solidified that. Four months later, he was named creative director of Givenchy, and a year after that, he took the helm at Christian Dior. The juxtaposition of these two silhouettes — sharply tailored and strikingly similar — speaks to fashion’s cyclical nature. Nearly 45 years apart, they look uncannily alike. “We all know fashion is cyclical,” says curator Kevin Jones, his voice hovering just above the music. “But you know, for me, as a historian, great design stays great — always.” 

The ’90s Are Back!

“You know when you kind of sense something all of a sudden in the air?” Kevin says. “Suddenly, you turn a corner, and something kind of really jumps out at you?” That something in the air was a renewed wave of nostalgia around the ‘90s that Kevin as well as Christina Frank, the exhibition’s curator, noticed both in and outside the institute’s halls. (It’s been even more amplified given the latest fascination with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wardrobe — thanks to Ryan Murphy’s popular new series, Love Story, which continues to have social media in a chokehold.)

The exhibit captures something of that original thrill from the millennial precipice. Not in years had the future appeared to hold more optimism. The decade had, after all, started with the fall of a ruthless empire; the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union was lowered at last. Back home in the United States, things were on the up and up. The economy was expanding. Millions of jobs were added to the workforce. The rapid rise of technology signaled a future that felt newly open-ended and full of hope. There was a sense, however fleeting, that the world was somehow resetting itself for the better. 

That message filtered down to fashion, of course, though not through a single, easily defined aesthetic. “When you actually step back and look at it as a decade, and what was going on in just that short 10-year period for fashion was really extraordinary,” Kevin says. The easiest way to think of ‘90s fashion is as a backlash to what came before it. The more-is-more excess of the 1980s gave way to a longing for authenticity and realness. 

Seattle emerged as an unlikely cultural epicenter — the backdrop to rom-coms and sit-coms, home to America’s most recognizable coffee chain, and the birthplace of grunge. Bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam excited people with angst-heavy anthems that defined the sound of the decade and just as importantly, its fashion. It was one of the clearest early instances of music directly influencing the way people dressed. The easily adoptable, anything-goes “grunge” look was transferred from the streets to runways and glossy magazines: threadbare plaid flannels, ripped jeans, cracked leather jackets, and sweaters so shredded they looked moth-eaten. 

In 1993, for example, 29-year-old Marc Jacobs sent lumberjack shirts and floral granny dresses, styled with beanies, chokers, and slouchy knit caps, down the runway at Perry Ellis. Critics widely condemned the collection, arguing that grunge had no place in high fashion, least of all at Perry Ellis, which was known in the 1980s for pioneering a polished, distinctly American brand of casual elegance. The collection was, nevertheless, burned into the fashion industry’s collective memory — even if (or perhaps especially because) it got the designer fired shortly afterward. 

‘Antifashion is Fashion’

Also as a backlash to the polished opulence of 1980s fashion, the era ushered in a new wave of designers dubbed “deconstructionists,” whose work turned fashion inside out, both literally and figuratively. Renegades like Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo challenged normative ideas about silhouette and shape. Deconstructionists embraced rawness and imperfection by exposing seams and leaving hems unfinished, deliberately distressing fabric, and using linings on the outside of garments. 

Kevin points to a soft, airy 1997 Comme des Garcons dress, lined with kidney-shaped down pillows at the hips. The way those protuberances manipulate the body in the most unexpected places, he says, completely went against conservative views of femininity that emphasized the breasts and hips. “At the time, it was so … ugly,” he says, “People couldn’t understand it. When you look at it now — or at least with me — oh my God, this is absolutely stunning.” 

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Martin Margiela’s cloven-toed “tabi” boots offer up another example of a designer questioning the accepted norms of design. Even now, 38 years after he first introduced his signature footwear, it still makes some people still bristle with discomfort. “Tabis are a rude in-joke: They openly dare you to consider them ugly or revolting, exposing yourself as a commoner,” reads a New York Times article published after the shoes became the center of a viral social media scandal involving a woman whose Tinder date vanished with her pair. 

In the ‘90s, another crop of designers injected fashion with humor and irreverence. Franco Moschino — ever the social commentator — poked fun at the excesses of the 1980s with appliques, logos, and slogans. At the exhibition, I make a beeline for a cropped jacket with trompe l’oeil breasts and a cotton dress with collar-style appliques from the early 90s. Also noteworthy: Christian Francis Roth’s dollar-bill dress, which commentated on the previous decade’s fixation on wealth. 

In the mid-’90s, there was also a distinct pull towards a stripped-down and minimalist approach to dress, popularized by designers like Calvin Klein, whose clean, no-frills aesthetic vision made him one of the most respected talents of his generation. Of course, we can’t talk about this period in fashion without mentioning another one of its superheroes, Tom Ford, who singlehandedly transformed Gucci into a billion-dollar luxury conglomerate and one of the hottest brands of the industry. He had an instinct to tap into the moment of the 90s that was about allure and seduction. He designed sexy, but even more importantly, he sold it. Tom Ford’s Gucci reveled in the nightlife glamour of impeccably dressed women who looked sleek and a little undone.

Fans of Gucci’s Tom Ford-ian era are in for a surprise at the exhibit: the red velvet suit from his 1996 fall collection, which was — how can we forget? — so effortlessly worn by Gwyneth Paltrow on the red carpet. “It … just kills me, because I remember that suit so vividly,” Kevin says. I have to agree: Seeing the look up-close in person — plush burgundy velvet, the silk-satin peak lapels, the pale-blue shirt underneath — feels so special. Another personal favorite is a stunning ribbon cage dress designed by Issey Miyake in 1991. A feat of construction, the ribbons are stitched together to create a see-through lattice around the body.

Of course, there are so many other incredible designers who defined the decade, like Alexander McQueen, who elevated fashion into performance and shocked the fashion world with his ultra-ultra low-rise “bumsters;” Gianni Versace, who embodied overtly sexy, bold glamour and celebrity culture; and Vivienne Westwood, one of fashion’s true originators. Each one of these fashion mavericks, in their own way, ripped up the rule book of a decade many looked back on with a shudder.

This might be why designers are referencing that moment of change again, why people are looking back at it with so much affection, and why it seems to be resonating so loudly for everyone across generations, even for those who have never experienced it. “For students to suddenly have that interest — these young people who were not born until the 2000s,” Kevin tells me. “There’s a sudden connection. We all want a connection, and often, it comes from fashion.”