1990s fashion: A brief history of what we wore

Written by Marianna Cerini, CNNNineties fashion was hard to pin down. A clash of trends screamed for our attention while others were so quietly cool they’re still sartorial staples in our collective wardrobes: slip dresses, Doc Martens, chokers, crop tops. While the 1980s were all about volume — padded shoulders, puffed jackets, big hair and an obsession with designer wear — style in the early 1990s was decidedly low maintenance. The slip dress, one of the decade’s most enduring garments, is perhaps the most glaring example of this. Spaghetti straps held up barely-there silk dresses, swapping the frills of the ’80s for minimalist ease.Weekends were about biker shorts, turtlenecks, high-waisted jeans and baggy, logo tees. Hair was scraped into scrunchies or left as flouncy, unstyled manes.The ’90s also gave rise to celebrity supermodels, including Linda Evangelista who summed up the industry’s excesses at the start of the decade by saying she didn’t get out of bed “for less than $10,000 a day.”