VLT Editorial
THE 1990s: HEROIN CHIC MINIMALISM
Slip dresses, pale skin, and the rejection of 80s excess.
In 1993, Corinne Day shot Kate Moss for The Face in a bedsit in North London. Kate was wearing a Native American headdress and underwear. There was an ashtray on the bedside table. The pictures were immediately controversial and immediately iconic, because they showed something fashion had never quite shown before: a model who looked like she actually lived somewhere.
Heroin chic is the wrong name for what happened in 1990s fashion. The right name is anti-glamour glamour, the decision to make rawness the aesthetic, vulnerability the pose, the mundane real the backdrop. Calvin Klein understood this. Helmut Lang understood it. The slip dress existed because underneath the extravagance of the 80s there was a question about what fashion looks like when it stops performing.
The answer, apparently, was this: a thin woman in a thin dress in a sparse room in gray morning light. The dress costs more than the rent. The anti-glamour is the point. These images try to recover the specific tension of that moment, not to celebrate it, but to see it clearly.
