Taking us into 2000: Vogue’s struggle with time in the 1990s

This article traces the construction of the 1990s as a fashion category via written and visual representations in US Vogue, as an illustration of the uneasy relationship between the fashion system and temporality. In the pages of Vogue, the twentieth century’s tendency to reduce clothing styles to decade-specific categories culminated in a self-conscious questioning beginning in 1990 as to what that decade would look like, how it would break from the past, and how it would be remembered in the future. I examine fashion news and editorial pages from the debut, the midpoint and the conclusion of the 1990s, as well as an oft-reprinted 1992 editorial that has become a period touchstone: the ‘Grunge & glory’ editorial, which has acquired a wider cultural profile that speaks to the way a decade becomes rhetorically condensed to a few visual cues, a process only truly possible in retrospect. My analysis of the contents of the magazine is informed by four differing models of time presented by John Urry, Judy Attfield and Zygmunt Bauman, including postmodern ideas of time-space compression and the ‘eternal instant’. I seek to uncover what Vogue’s representation of itself on the eve of the millennium can tell us about commercial fashion’s hierarchy of commodifiable memory in which the ‘now’ and the long-ago past are valued far above the recent past.