Kate Moss, McQueen and Hirst: Edward Enninful’s Tate Britain show makes the 90s one scene

A young woman with candyfloss-pink hair sinks into white hotel pillows, the duvet drawn up to her chin, caught mid-word. It is Kate Moss, photographed by Juergen Teller, and the picture has none of the machinery of a fashion image: no garment to sell, no held pose, no flattering light. That a snapshot like this now leads a major Tate Britain exhibition is the whole argument in miniature. In Britain’s nineties, the border between a fashion photograph and a work of art stopped holding.

The curator is Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who came of age professionally inside that decade as a teenage fashion director at i-D. Tate says his lived experience of the period shapes the show, which he has built with a team of Tate curators: Jessica Vaughan, Helen Little, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Alex Farquharson and Celeste McEvoy. The museum bills it as the first major exhibition to treat the era’s art and fashion as a single subject.

The neoclassical portico of Tate Britain on Millbank in London — Tate Britain, Millbank. Photo: Julian Herzog (CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

The frame Tate offers is historical. With the Cold War over and Britain climbing out of recession, the announcement describes a new mood of optimism, freedom and rebellion, carried by a more diverse generation of creative talent, in which art, design, fashion and music fused into one potent cultural force. The exhibition gathers more than 100 photographs, paintings, sculptures, films and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers.

The roster reads like a map of that collision. The photographers who rewrote the fashion page, among them Corinne Day, Nigel Shafran, David Sims and Nick Knight, share the galleries with the Young British Artists: Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Sam Taylor-Johnson. Works named so far include Teller’s Young Pink Kate, London (1998), Chris Ofili’s No Woman, No Cry (1998), Steve McQueen’s film Bear (1993), Wolfgang Tillmans’s Concorde Grid (1997) and Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). On the fashion side are Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Stella McCartney, Philip Treacy, Ozwald Boateng and Joe Casely-Hayford.

What makes the pairing worth watching is the question it cannot dodge. Hanging a Teller portrait of Moss a few rooms from an Ofili painting asks whether the casual, unretouched look that sold magazines was itself one of the decade’s most consequential art forms, or whether a national museum is simply canonising its own youth. The exhibition is supported by McQueen, the house founded by one of the designers on its walls, which makes the case for the works themselves all the more important.

The 90s: Art and Fashion opens at Tate Britain on 8 October 2026 and runs until 14 February 2027, daily from 10.00 to 18.00, in the Upper Galleries at Millbank. Entry is free for Tate Members, and visitors aged 16 to 25 can see it for £5 through Tate Collective. A catalogue edited by Enninful and Heyse-Moore accompanies the show.

For a decade that treated the gallery and the magazine as the same room, the most telling detail may be the simplest: the first image Tate chose to show the world is a woman in bed, not a dress.

Tags: Tate Britain, Alexander McQueen, Edward Enninful, fashion exhibitions, Juergen Teller, Kate Moss