It was, as male model Tyson Beckford says in the opening episode of In Vogue: The 90s, "a great time to be alive." Especially if you happened to be young, famous, and beautiful. Beckford spent that decade glaring down on mere mortals from the giant Ralph Lauren billboards on which he starred in glossy ad campaigns. A bit like Christ the Redeemer over Rio, but in a tight white polo vest and with one arm around Naomi Campbell.
In the 1990s, fashion had the power to anoint our gods and goddesses. A Vogue cover was a coronation ceremony. Supermodels were the darlings of popular culture, glossy magazine editors the power behind the throne. This imperial era of fashion was kicked off, with precision timing, by the January 1990 cover of British Vogue. Peter Lindbergh's black-and-white portrait of Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz announced the dawn of the supermodel era and kicked off a decade in which fashion was the engine room of popular culture. For the next decade, the party rolled straight from the front row to the Groucho and onto the front pages the next morning.
In Vogue: The 90s is a six-part Disney+ retrospective of a decade that had it all. The magic of the '90s is that it was both luxurious and delinquent, and one of the joys of this series is the candid shots of those nights out. We see Liam Gallagher, exuding free-spirited bar energy as he waddles through an afterparty, Liz Hurley, serving up bombshells in a Versace safety-pin dress, her smile widening as the flashbulbs blare. Everyone's smoking Marlboro Lights and stepping out of black cabs in Louboutin heels.
The alchemy lies in the precarious dance between glamour and grunge, between the rarefied and the licentious. This was the decade that included Kurt Cobain in a moth-eaten cardigan and Puff Daddy - as he was then known - in a white fur coat. On the catwalk, it ricocheted from the apple-pie wholesomeness of the early supermodel era to Marc Jacobs' iconic grunge collection and Tom Ford's racy reign at Gucci. It was the moment when Hollywood's red carpet injected sex appeal into the once-sleepy world of awards shows, but when actresses still dressed in whatever they wanted, rather than what they were contractually obligated to wear.
The 90s were brilliant. I should know - I'm old enough to have had a front-row seat. I hung out with Take That in Miami, attended one of Jennifer Lopez's weddings and accompanied Tracey Emin to Paris Fashion Week. But nostalgia for the 90s is strong among those who weren't even born then. The hottest gigs of 2025 are the return of Oasis, 29 years after their iconic Knebworth dates. In their baggy jeans, cropped tops, cycling shorts, baseball caps and scrunchies, most Gen Zers have pulled their wardrobes straight out of the 90s.
London became the fashion centre of the world with Lee McQueen as circus director and Kate Moss as muse
Vogue: The 90s tells the story of how glossy magazines - not just Vogue itself, but also Face and i-D - became the newspapers of popular culture. Edward Enninful, who was i-D's fashion director as a teenager, tells the story of how London, with its great fashion colleges and outrageous club scene, became the centre of the fashion world, with Lee McQueen as ringmaster and Kate Moss as muse. There are interviews with two titans of American Vogue, styling legends Grace Coddington and Tonne Goodman; the charming Hamish Bowles, a national treasure of British fashion and the host of the podcast from which the series was conceived, who has returned to the industry after suffering a serious stroke two years ago; and some wonderfully entertaining cameos from legendary fashion editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, a Gallic Cruella de Vil in leopard print, gleefully reminiscing about the tantrums and tiaras of fashion's most idiosyncratic era.
But even with an all-star cast that includes Kim Kardashian, Naomi Campbell, Tom Ford, Gwyneth Paltrow and Baz Luhrmann, there's no doubt who the star of In Vogue is: the '90s. As Goodman puts it with characteristic clarity, "Vogue is Anna, and Anna is Vogue." Wintour is this world's Logan Roy. A supporting cast of stylists and protégés fill the roles of Connor, Kendall, Roman and Shiv. The tone is set early, when an off-camera voice politely asks Wintour to remove her trademark sunglasses for an interview. The stark flatness she rejects, certain her word is gospel, reflects the absolute power Wintour wields within the Vogue empire.
Wintour's influence on popular culture extended far beyond fashion. She invented an archetype-"the chic, powerful boss," as Kim Kardashian calls it-that became a blueprint for women in the spotlight. From Kardashian herself to Gwyneth Paltrow and Victoria Beckham, many of the most successful women of later generations have borrowed from her playbook, balancing a feminine wardrobe with a coolly detached emotional tone that feels more patrician than maternal. The secret of how Wintour's personal power has endured-even as the power of once-important glossy magazines has crumbled around her-is a mystery that remains hidden behind those dark glasses.
The show is an X-ray of fashion's power dynamics and a cardiograph of the swinging pendulum of popular culture. It tracks the decade's prevailing winds as they shift direction from the perfection-worshipping supermodel fever of the early decade to the Perry Ellis "grunge" collection that scandalized New York Fashion Week in 1992. Wintour makes no secret of her hatred of grunge, but as Marc Jacobs says, "no force on earth"-read: not even Anna-"can stop an idea whose time has come." Yet just two years later, we see Amber Valletta opening Tom Ford's Gucci show in a mostly unbuttoned silk blouse and velvet hipsters, a moment she remembers as a "sonic wave" of sexual energy. The ever-irony Ford notes, of the whiplash switch from grunge to glam, that "you can only be depressed for so long."
"So much happened in the '90s that shaped where we are in fashion today," Goodman notes. "As Anna says, the '90s really changed our world. The insult of hip-hop and grunge opened our eyes to the critical relevance of fashion in culture-and we welcomed every eyeopener." The '90s were indeed a great time to be alive. Nostalgia has never looked so good.