Spice Up Your Life: Tate Channels 90S Glam At The Groucho Club The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A Soho press preview set the tone for Tate Britain's autumn 2026 exhibition, which aims to widen the lens on a decade often reduced to a single art-world shorthand. The museum's The 90s: Art and Fashion will run from October 8, 2026, to February 14, 2027, and is being shaped with former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful.

Enninful introduced the project at The Groucho Club in London, a venue closely associated with 1990s cultural life. Speaking to the press, he described the decade as one marked by“energy and a refusal of hierarchy,” and stressed that the Young British Artists story is only one part of the picture, not the whole of it.

That framing matters. The 1990s remain one of the most mythologized periods in recent British art, but they were also years when fashion, photography, performance, and painting moved in close conversation. Tate Britain's exhibition appears set to trace those overlaps rather than isolate art from the wider visual culture that shaped it.

Dominique Heyse-Moore, one of the curators, presented key works and artists included in the show, among them Damien Hirst, Corinne Day, Helen Chadwick, and Jenny Saville. The range suggests an exhibition interested in the decade's broader visual language: the cool detachment of fashion imagery, the bodily intensity of painting, and the conceptual edge that defined much of the period's most influential work.

Enninful also used the occasion to note the exhibition's curatorial team, joking that the all-women group is Tate's equivalent of the Spice Girls. The remark fit the mood of the preview: polished, self-aware, and rooted in the cultural crosscurrents that made the 1990s feel so distinct.

For Tate Britain, the exhibition offers more than nostalgia. It is a chance to revisit a decade that still shapes how British art is remembered, while asking what gets left out when the story is told too narrowly. By placing art and fashion in the same frame, the museum is signaling that the 1990s were not just a movement, but a network of images, attitudes, and ambitions that continue to resonate.

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