Nineties to Now: Fashion of the Year Retrospective

From glamour to ghetto fabulous, power suits to hippy chic, slip dresses to sportswear...rediscover must-have fashion highlights from the 1990s to now. This exhibition looks at the major trends since 1991, when the Powerhouse Museum began its Fashion of the Year program to collect the year's most influential designs.

Since 1991 the Powerhouse Museum's fashion and dress curators have been holding annual panel meetings with prominent fashion commentators from Australian Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian Women's Weekly and The Australian. Together they consider the key designers, trends and themes in the year's ready-to-wear collections and select 4-6 key outfits and accessories to become part of the Museum's permanent collection.

Nineties to Now brings the entire Fashion of the Year collection together in an exhibition exploring trans-millennial fashion and some of the social, political, economic and cultural shifts that have influenced its character and form. Nineties to Now is the age of individuality; we have more freedom to interpret fashion in a personal manner and more confidence to style ourselves to suit personality and lifestyle. We disregard many of the old rules of fashion etiquette, wearing the same clothing from day into evening, and street to Opera House. We also combine pieces that were formerly segregated: day and evening, masculine and feminine, expensive with cheap, high tech with hand crafted and vintage with modern.

Fashion designers have responded by drawing on an increasingly eclectic range of sources of inspiration to suit our passion for something new and unseen, leaving a confusing trail of co-existing contradictory trends. Fashion retailing has fragmented into myriad-niche and micro- niche markets so the consumer now has an over-abundance of places to shop from department store, international luxury brand boutiques, multi-brand boutiques and chain stores to the endless opportunities offered by the Internet and Cable TV. In our search for individual looks, vintage and retro dressing have become integrated with mainstream fashion as they deliver an affordable and often one-of-a kind piece.

Nineties to Now's thematic storyline draws on the playful language of fashion editors, reflecting how aptly they sum up a trend and project its meaning in a catchy title and a few shrewdly chosen phrases.

From street to elite reflects the dressed down mood of the 1990s as it sought to distance itself from the conspicuous consumption and ostentatious 'look-at-me' drama of 1980s fashion. In a period marked by economic and political instability, war and atrocities, a strong note of restraint was felt in all aspects of life. Searching for a well-grounded authenticity, surfing, skating, sportswear, workwear and sub-cultural styles became important sources of fashion and inspiration for street and high fashion. Australian brands like Mambo injected a laconic local humour into surfwear while at the top end of the market John Galliano at Christian Dior.

created his Ghetto Fabulous homage to female hip-hop stars.

No fashion item is more authentic than the denim jean with its American workwear roots, but even it had a brief crisis of confidence in the mid 1990s with media alerts sounding the death of denim after Levi's closed manufacturing plants in the USA and Europe and young people turned away from traditional jeans styles because their parents were still wearing them. But fashion's most adaptable staple rallied with designers Reinventing denim. Melbourne designer Roy Christou introduced unisex sherbet coloured jeans and jean jackets, sass and bide did it with sexy new cuts and how-low-can-you-go hipsters and skirts. New philosophies were expressed in Tsubi's arty transgressions with denim and Junya Watanabe experimented with new finishes in his distressed and shredded conversation pieces.

Responding in quite a different way to this sober mood were Fashion purists like Giorgio Armani whose stylish, immaculately tailored understated clothes crafted a new look for professional women, marking a trend to investment dressing with clothes that withstand time in terms of quality and style.

While obvious displays of wealth were considered gauche Stealth Wealth dressing gave intimate form to the expression of affluence. Rejecting logos in favour of the hidden luxury of garments made from high quality cashmere, wool and silk gave the wearer a private sensual experience and a certain smug confirmation of self worth. However in keeping with the contradictions of the age this trend was countered by the consumers' passion for luxury brand Excessories, with bags, shoes and sunglasses featuring the well known international language of designer logos. To the despair of many major international brands, and the glee of those who couldn't afford an original, there was also a flourishing trade in copies of cult bags like the Fendi baguette. Even the popular TV show Sex in the City reflected on the handbag fetish in a plot line featuring Samantha trying to get on the exclusive waiting list for a Hermes Birkin bag and Carrie searching for a copy of the latest Fendi bag.

While fashion usually responds more subtly to the undercurrent of social and economic concerns some designers took issue with the major causes of Global anxiety. In 1994 Moschino featured the text 'Ecology Wow, Ecology Now' on a clear plastic jacket, highlighting the ongoing global environmental crisis and cheekily responding with a message reflecting fashions economic inability to respond. In a period marked by war and terrorism, Japanese designer, Junya Watanabe's 2002 collection included belts and T-shirts with messages of peace and love.

A trend that probably also had its roots on the street with a youth movement dubbed Grunge is Underwear as outerwear. The popular floral printed slip dress became the model for a fashion staple explored through a multiplicity of perspectives from the hippy overtones of Consuelo Castiglioni at Marni to the raunchy styles of Gianni Versace.The exoticism of the 'Orient' has been a recurring theme in fashionable dress and East meets west conflations continue to inspire contemporary designers. John Galliano reworked the cheongsam in his first ready-to-wear collection for Christian Dior while the diversity of Asia's rich textile traditions is an ongoing theme in the work of Australian based designers Akira.

Isogawa and Easton Pearson. With Collette Dinnigan at the fore, these last two designers also advanced the Attack of the Antipodeans on the global market ensuring Australian designer's now capture the interest of international buyers.

Fashion designers were not only travelling the world for inspiration but also exploring the rich repository of ideas available through Time tripping. Many designers focused on rethinking the recent past with trends inspired by the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s following each other at so rapid a rate that fashion's past almost caught up with its future. American Tom Ford produced some of the most eloquent expressions of retro referencing when he gave 1960s psychedelia a healthy reworking in his swirling devore dresses for Gucci in 1996. Ford's name is also closely associated with dramatic changes in international fashion and the domination of international luxury brands by four fashion conglomerates. They took over many established fashion houses and brought in young designers from America and Great Britain to revitalise these often waning brands. Tom Ford worked his magic at both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, John Galliano had great success at Givenchy and Christian Dior and American Marc Jacobs placed Louis Vuitton back at the forefront of fashion.

Feminism, vibrant youth cultures, multi-ethnic communities and gay politics have all influenced the new diversity of choice in men fashion. In His New Clothes the modern male is no longer simply defined by the power based messages of the formal suit or limited by the 'I couldn't care less how I look' message of jeans and T-shirt. In Australia a new generation of designers are creating a more complex mix of clothing to cover the diversity of men's lives and personalities. The Marcs label offers a gentler slightly rumpled version of the new man, Saba created an edgier look for the young executive and Country Road provides a more relaxed range of separates for work and weekend wear.

Finally we mustn't forget the one item of clothing that dominates this period and underlines the era of the 'multi-woman'- Women in pants. Despite bans on women wearing pants in the workplace still appearing in the early 1990s, pants became one of the most popular clothing choices for women in Australia for all aspects of their lives.

With such a diversity of styles available and such a frenetic pace of change why did the fashion editors who reported on the latest exciting trends always seem to appear in a uniform of black?. Kirstie Clements at Harper's Bazaar Australia explained the fashion editor's dilemma "...name any trend and we've seen it six or even 12 months beforehand, we've had every possible variation in the stock room, we've shot it, we've captioned it, and we've sent it back. It's not even in store yet, won't be for ages. But we're over it." 1.

Nineties to Now: Fashion of the Year Retrospective will be displayed at the Powerhouse Museum from the 28 April until the 18 July 2004.

1. (Harper's Bazaar Australia, October 1999. p 40)