Fashion

de Neville Wakefield

Fashion: Photography of the Nineties is a compilation of over two hundred images culled from the worlds of art and fashion. A chronicle of the fashion iconography of the Nineties, it places images familiar from magazines and style journals alongside their wilder, darker counterparts, many of which are published here for the first time. In these photographs the body and its gestures report on the defining characteristics of a decade. Postures of anxiety, insecurity and sexual uncertainty co-exist with fashion's more traditional celebrations. The ambiguity of gender and beauty lays bare our secret desires, dissolving the boundaries between what is worn and the way we wear it. Elegance and vulgarity, femininity and masculinity, art and fashion meet in the spaces separating the raw, the beautiful, the unkempt and the subversive. Out of the collision between style and the subconscious emerges a portrait of our time.