One of the stranger trends on the discussion platform Reddit highlights just how many variations there are on this one question: why did the Nineties look like that? Most of the time the people posing them are too young to remember 9/11, let alone the years immediately preceding it. But they share a fascination with the photographs taken of that decade, and the clothes, and the makeup.
Sometimes the question is about the era’s cars, or its architecture, or its films and television. What was up with how good everything looked? Why did light seem that much kinder? Why do street scenes in the original Sex and the City hold so much colour and vibrance, yet the street scenes in And Just Like That look as if you’re watching Sarah Jessica Parker skip around an Apple store? Why, the children ask, do the Nineties just seem… better?
It’s a tiny microcosm of what is increasingly accepted as a fact of modern life: that the Nineties were better than whatever we’re dealing with currently. Think of all the music and the filmmaking! Put aside the Gulf war, Aids, the Rodney King riots, OJ Simpson, Clinton and Lewinsky, Bosnia, mad cow disease, increased globalisation and corporate fiefdom, and the dawn of focus-on-the-family conservatism, and it was practically a blissful utopia of good vibes! And you, dear reader, may be one of those pining nostalgia-heads, sitting in your cramped, hopeless, still-traumatised-by-Covid flatshare and wishing you could go back.
Others echo that view, at least. A few years ago, a YouGov poll found that the Nineties were the UK’s most fondly remembered decade. A similar poll, published earlier this month, identified the period between 1993 and 2001 as one of the two best eras in American history, more or less tying with 1980 to 1991. Make America great again? Just make it 1995, and Bob’s your uncle, apparently.
That poll, though, doesn’t make clear who the 1,139 Americans were who actually voted. We know they were “adults”, but that could mean anything: individuals who lived through the Nineties – and by that I mean really lived – or people like me, 1992 babies with vivid memories of only the last hurrah of the decade. If we’re being totally honest, they could also be people with absolutely no tangible sense of the Nineties outside of Throwback Thursday Instagram posts. Eighteen-year-olds, basically.
But why do the Nineties still hold such allure? They were, in lots of ways, a decade of abundance, of every creative field firing on all cylinders. Of Nirvana, Tupac, Blur and the Spice Girls, of Quentin Tarantino, Jurassic Park and Richard Curtis. Think Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein and Empire Records. The Simpsons, Twin Peaks and Father Ted. There was money and time being thrown at artists of all stripes, allowing each and every person to discover something of value and significance in the decade’s cultural wares.
Real investment was put into Caroline Aherne and Larry David, into the Gallagher brothers and Britney Spears. It was easy to find your stuff because there was simply so much of it. Not keen on Alanis? Try Kim Gordon. Repelled by Men Behaving Badly? Try Absolutely Fabulous. In a random week in June 1999, the top 10 singles in the UK included “Hey Boy Hey Girl” by The Chemical Brothers, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” by Shania Twain, “Sweet Like Chocolate” by Shanks & Bigfoot, and Sixpence None the Richer’s treacly classic “Kiss Me”. At No 1? Baz Luhrmann’s misty-eyed, spoken-word oddity “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”. There was range.
The internet, inevitably, ruined it. Popularised by hippies and geeks around 1993 and 1994, it created even more abundance, but going backwards in time: increasingly the entire history of culture was available at our disposal, shrinking the necessity for the new and innovative. The late theorist Mark Fisher termed this “the slow cancellation of the future”, something that inherently empowered nostalgia as well as cultural exports riffing on the past – think the Sixties pastiches of Amy Winehouse records, or the more blunt examples of modern reboot culture.
Revivals of Clueless, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files are all in the works. Revivals of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Cold Feet and The Crystal Maze have already been and gone. This summer’s hottest ticket is the Oasis reunion. In the context of a cancelled future spearheaded by the World Wide Web, the Nineties really were the last best decade, weren’t they?
I spent the early Nineties dressed in a parade of oversized plaid, my straggly, inexplicably ice-blond hair down to my shoulders. I was a mini Kurt Cobain, straight through to the occasional preference for paisley womenswear as a lark. It remains unclear to me which one of us it was more appropriate for: the twentysomething depressive rock-god, or the nappy-wearing slob. He certainly pulled it off better, in any case.
Photographs of my much younger self showcase a child unknowingly operating in tandem with the trends of the time: flowery zip-up jackets that scream Ian Brown; bucket hats that are very Happy Mondays; the Spice Girls T-shirt I was nicely never embarrassed by; a late-decade turn into blocky, monochrome pullovers that were presumably Tommy Hilfiger done by Debenhams.
Nothing is too shameful, either, which I suppose is why it’s all rife again now: flannel, velvet, overalls, ski coats, oversized everything, those cursed but inexplicably chic jelly shoes. Not included in that shame-free list: Backstreet Boys-style curtain hair, which I was simply far too cool a six-year-old to have, but is unaccountably back again, too – just one more monument to a decade that’s longed for.
Outside of sartorial trends and pop culture, the Nineties also allowed for an everyday ease that’s been largely impossible for the majority ever since. The UK economy grew across the decade, and unemployment was down – something that was replicated in the US; the essentials of living were generally affordable. There were no major wars, and instead there was a feeling that there was much less at stake.
There was no social media, of course, so our lives were far smaller. Outside of your IRL bubble, other people’s opinions were consigned to vox-pop columns in newspapers, or the media in general. There have been enormous benefits to a digitally connected populace, but also infinite drawbacks: bad-faith actors, extremists, the platforming of the absolutely deranged among us. Everyone is on their phone, and everyone is miserable – in place of boredom is a kind of frantic monotony, where clicking, scrolling and typing is used to fill time. Remember walking idly around shopping centres?
The really funny thing about the idea of modern misery and Nineties joy, though, is that it’s all basically nonsense. People were depressed in the Nineties, had addiction problems and pangs of self-loathing. People were poor, struggling and forgotten about. Figures like Spears, Pamela Anderson and Melanie Sykes have all spoken about the toll of being hyper-sexualised in the public eye, and the thin line between complicity and exploitation. A litany of famous men were lairy, Frank Skinner types, and I saw far too many photographs of Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay stumbling out of nightclubs, maleness at its allegedly aspirational peak.
Every bit of body dysmorphia I experience today is a product of being a child of the Nineties, and the messaging conveyed by the culture of the time. Keanu Reeves was lambasted for gaining weight in the wake of Speed. Janeane Garofalo was eternally cast as “the funny fat friend”. I am far too ashamed to publish the names of some of the famous women I was convinced were overweight back then – I was a child, yes, but also somebody watching the frames of female TV stars slowly shrink over the runs of their series, as if to be beautiful and successful you had to disappear. They got super-thin, so I needed to get super-thin. Anyone who wasn’t was a whale. The psychic damage of that era is impossible to quantify.
At least today we talk about this stuff, and there are forums to express exasperation at the return of the cult of skinny. And we know now that behind practically every incredibly cool, brilliant movie produced by Harvey Weinstein in the Nineties was a raft of sexual misconduct and a generation of terrified actresses.
The Nineties were great because they looked stylish and were creatively thrilling, but also because the monoculture of the time insisted upon blissful ignorance. Dissenting voices were there, but they were often drowned out by that aforementioned abundance. It was easy to pretend the bad stuff didn’t exist – or easy, at least, to switch it off rather than see it on your TikTok feed. Was it easier to move through the world? Maybe. Was it healthy? Not at all.
Still, there was really great music. At least we can all agree on that.
