1990s Minimalism and Grunge

The decade opens with grunge - baggy, worn-in jeans, flannel shirts, and Doc Martens, borrowed straight from Seattle's music scene - reaching the runway most famously through Marc Jacobs' 1993 Perry Ellis collection, which took workwear-as-street-style and sold it, at real cost to his job at the time, as high fashion. From there the decade swings hard toward the opposite instinct: minimalism, epitomized by the slip dress - a bias-cut, unlined, barely-there shape descended directly from the 1930s gowns this site covers separately, worn equally as eveningwear or thrown over a plain t-shirt. By the end of the decade, a third strand emerged in designers like Dries Van Noten and Matthew Williamson mixing ethnic embroidery and pattern back into the pared-down silhouette, alongside the era's other holdover, the low-slung jean.

The slip dress is the piece worth sewing to actually understand this decade, because it's a direct technical descendant of the 1930s bias-cut gown - the same 45-degree cut, the same reliance on drape rather than structure to shape the body - just stripped of the earlier decade's embellishment and cut in cheaper, more casual fabric. It's deceptively hard to get right for how simple it looks: there's nowhere for a fitting problem to hide on a garment with almost no seams, so the bias cut and the body underneath it have to actually agree.

What I find most interesting about this decade, in hindsight, is how directly the grunge-versus-minimalism split maps onto opposite reactions to the excess of the previous decade's power dressing - one rejecting polish entirely, the other keeping the polish but stripping away everything structural underneath it.