Hard parties, cheap rents and horrible flats: how 90s art and fashion redefined British culture

An evocative new Tate Britain show captures an era when the UK’s newly flush creative industries teamed up with a generation of skint dreamers to bring the decade into vivid colour

Here is Kate Moss, with pink hair splayed across a pillow, her face scrubbed of makeup, her smile sweet and wonky. Sarah Lucas’s Pauline Bunny artwork with its confrontational hosiery on a charity shop chair. Sean Ellis’s collaborative knights-in-grubby-armour shoot with Alexander McQueen. Here are happy ravers, in a club, or saluting the sun as it stretches and yawns over a litter-strewn hill.

These photos are old. They were taken a long time ago. But they’re young, too. They are curated by Edward Enninful for the Tate’s exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion (Enninful worked at i-D in the 90s) and almost everyone involved is shiny and fresh. The models, whether professional or not, are mostly in their 20s, and the photographers are early in their careers. It gives the photos a youthful fizz, a verve. But the energy also comes from an understanding between photographer and subject. In many of the pictures you can feel the shared mischief, a “yes we’re serious about our ideas” but also a “look, we’re getting away with it!” delight.

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Miu Miu turns ‘real clothes’ into high fashion with sportswear style

Brand’s signature desire to subvert the ordinary brings blazers with track pants and crop tops under blazers to Paris fashion week

Speaking backstage at Miu Miu’s show on Sunday at Paris fashion week, Miuccia Prada said she had been thinking about “real clothes”. The clothes people wear on the street for running errands rather than posing on social media. Her findings? Succinct. “The reality of clothing today is this mix – sportswear, casual, normal,” she said. Her challenge? To make them “more interesting, more rich”. To achieve this, she outlined how she had decided to focus on mixing “elements of sports with sophistication”.

The collection opened with a series of five neatly pleated checked skirts. The first was worn with an equally neat checked blazer but rather than a smart shoe, such as a pump or loafers, there were brightly coloured trainers. The second featured a crop top under the blazer, the trainers swapped for spiky high heels. The other looks ditched the blazer and clipped the tops so they sat just under the bust line.

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Harry Styles walked eight miles in loafers. Is he ruining his feet? There’s only one way to find out

For his trek across New York City, the singer wore a pair of Prada slip-ons. I tried to do the same in my penny loafers – and soon found out why experts advise against it

Last month, just before his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, Harry Styles was spotted walking the streets of New York. According to the paparazzi who trailed him throughout his journey, he walked eight miles – all the way from Brooklyn into Manhattan – in loafers.

If, like me, you own a pair of loafers, your first thought is probably: that doesn’t sound like a good idea. On Instagram, Grazia called Styles’ shoes “perhaps the least sensible footwear for such an undertaking”.

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Brimful of personality: the rise of fashion’s ‘silly little hats’

From pillboxes and boaters to bicornes and buckets, characterful hats are making their way from the catwalk to the high street

“Here goes – an order for a million hats,” wrote Jackie Kennedy to Bergdorf Goodman before moving into the White House in the early 1960s. It’s a line that could have been uttered by any number of people working in fashion today, because the hat – and not just the ubiquitous baseball cap – has been enjoying a very characterful resurgence.

This season at the turbo-high-end brand Loro Piana, whose clothes are beloved by tech bros and Kendall Roy, almost every model was wearing a hat. At Thom Browne, straw boaters came shrouded in colourful mesh. At Chloé there were see-through hats to match see-through trenchcoats and white sailor hats atop all-white outfits. Courrège’s hats were space-age, Burberry had big buckets, Bottega Veneta had hats brimming with charisma.

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Terrible idea or major coup? Galliano’s Zara collection launches after Met controversy

Collaboration regarded as ‘really big thing’ for retailer in some quarters despite backlash around designer’s antisemitic remarks in 2011

A month after it was announced that a planned exhibition dedicated to fashion designer John Galliano at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art would not proceed, his debut collection for fast fashion company Zara has been released.

Called Re{form}, it was, according to a press release, “authored by the couturier John Galliano. Built from our memory. Made for now.”

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