Remember a time before filters? Photoshop? The answer might depend on whether you lived through the era of All Saints’ baggy cargo pants or a Natalie Imbruglia pixie cut. Either way, you have probably noticed that the trends of the 1990s have been making a comeback – and they seem to show no sign of abating.
On planet fashion, this march on minimalism began to gain momentum with pared-back silhouettes from Toteme, Khaite, Dusan and The Row all rising to the occasion. ‘Little wonder,’ says British Vogue’s former fashion director Lucinda Chambers, and the woman behind many of the most iconic Vogue images of this period. ‘Whether it’s interiors or clothes, what’s in fashion is either cyclical or reactionary and we’ve had quite a lot of cottagecore and milk maid.’ The pendulum is swinging back and where fashion leads, interiors often follow.
Enter Donald Judd-inspired furniture and the stripped-back projects of design studios such as Tuttobene, lauded for ‘making spaces sing without turning up the volume’ according to Cubitts founder, Tom Broughton. Just as beguiling is the industrial feel of hybrid objects at FELS, Finbar Conran’s platform, the tactility of concrete tables at Eddie Olin or folded sheet metal pieces by Martino Gamper, which nod to the work of his former mentor Ron Arad, who pushed the boundaries of form and structure in steel and aluminium.
Max Radford, founder of the eponymously named east London gallery – which focuses on emerging talent – believes we are returning to the reductive nature of the late 1990s. ‘That simplicity is so appealing. It’s a challenge too because you can’t just hide behind decoration – what you put in a very spare space needs to be considered.’ The work of architect Claudio Silvestrin is as much an inspiration as the furniture of Belgian designers, father and son, Marteen and Hannes van Severen. For the canny among you, Max notes that you can still pick up pieces from the late 1990s or early 2000s which are incredibly well made and designed for not very much. ‘There’s an access to quality in that era that you don’t get from other decades,’ he says.
Style director Ruth Sleightholme has also embraced this marked move to tempering decoration. ‘It’s a prompt to pull in simple design pieces to help achieve a balanced, sophisticated end result. It’s nice to have a flourish, a scallop, a wave but it had got to the point where unnecessary additions were disguising bad proportions.’ George Morgan’s debut furniture collection, which comprises 11 pieces, was a recent standout for Ruth and was created to a manifesto born from the wish to populate his projects with furniture that didn’t fight for attention. ‘There is a trend to make things which are whimsical or statementy,’ says George. ‘What I’ve created is an antidote to that. It’s about being well made, being quiet. I wanted my “Standard” chair to have not too much of an opinion.’ ‘He was very intentional about that,’ adds Ruth.
Tom Dixon, creative director at Habitat during the 1990s and responsible for introducing collaborations with Achille Castiglioni and Ingvar Kamprad, has always embraced harder materials such as cooper, steel and cast iron. He thinks it can be difficult to be radical in today’s environment with everything up on Pinterest but, in what he described as the ‘massive soup of possibilities’, the more you pick out a couple of extremities and use them together, the better the end result. ‘It’s not about being in the middle but using both extremes,’ he adds. ‘So if I’m working with a textile, it’s the fattest, thickest fabric for upholstery in really saturated colours.’
So what is it about the late 1990s that has been resonating in recent years? Richard Benson, editor of The Face between 1995 and 1998, thinks what people express in terms of admiration for that time is that there was a lack of self-consciousness, a ‘not overthinking’ of anything. ‘You can sense a lot of human connection in those pictures,’ he says of the many visual references provided by the era. Understandable given that, as Lucinda points out, you only had one shot at something: ‘There was no altering it in post-production.’ And naturally that always created ‘a kind of nervousness, a tenseness and sense of anticipation which was actually really fantastic’. Laura Craik, fashion editor at The Face in the 1990s (as well as the Guardian and Evening Standard) remembers that stylists and photographers could shoot what they wanted: ‘There was no edict from above, no having to shoot full designer looks from one brand, which can so often look sterile.’
Designer Martino Gamper, however, is less convinced that our reworking of 1990s culture rings true. For him, today’s so-called 1990s minimalism feels sanitised, reduced to an aesthetic rather than an ideology. ‘The original movement was about rejecting ornamentation and focusing on material honesty, whereas today it’s often just another hyper-curated, soulless Instagram trend. True ’90s minimalism wasn’t just about looking clean – it was about cutting the unnecessary to make space for something real.’ If Martino’s observation throws up any conclusions, it’s that the 1990s was a time of experimentation and exploration, away from the glare of social media. It was ‘the last period of subcultures,’ reflects Max, and a reminder to be different.
‘I think one should always be encouraged to have your own view point, as opposed to being trend-led,’ says Lucinda. ‘Possibly we are more insecure about our houses because you can’t do them up in private and make mistakes. But try to allow room for originality and creativity which means finding your own colours and shapes.’
What is evident from looking at homes of this period – a sweet spot between the excess of the 1980s and the greige-ness of the later 2000s – is that homes did cultivate a personal style, a deeper reflection of the house owner, however idiosyncratic. There’s much to admire there, a confidence: being brave, being ourselves.
