Before COVID, customers searched 1990s stock “for very sexy Galliano, Dior, Cavalli - that kind of thing,” she explains, noting that just a few months ago, “people were posting the poshest things they could.” Now, in the age of shutdown, “that would just look out of touch.” Rodriguez has recently noticed something similar happening. Pull up any recent “How to Do the 1990s” fashion article (or look at photos of current supermodels Gigi, Kendall and Bella), and you’ll see knee socks, cardigans, fanny packs, fishnet stockings, slip dresses, flannel shirts and combat boots. Things were different in the ’90s, and the difference is reflected in the clothes. In contrast, “our last 10 years have seen the domination of nonstop luxury, money and status.” It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about status,” says Katy Rodriguez, cofounder of Resurrection. “The ethos of the time was, you could have style, you could be into all kinds of cool stuff. From America came denim, minimalism, grunge and hip-hop. Japan and Belgium gave fashion new avant-garde ideas to play with. The industry gained momentum from big-money relaunches of the great Paris houses Dior, Givenchy and Balenciaga, rescued at long last from the constraints of licensing. After the 1980s era of strong-shouldered working women, glossy aerobicized bodies and Madonna, fashion branched out. If it takes a practiced eye to identify that single concept, that’s because in truth, ’90s fashion was many things to many people. ![]() “Narrow-shouldered and narrow-hipped, the ’90s were skinny.” “ Fashion is a game of proportion,” Alexander Fury wrote in the New York Times in 2016. If there was one concept unifying 1990s fashion, it was the lean silhouette. ![]() And because fast fashion didn’t yet exist, the design associated with 1990s fashion - the handbags, clothing and the accessories of the era - has a quality appreciated by the millennial generation: authenticity. “But as I was painting work inspired by him, I came to love him.” Here, Tanaami answer’s T’s Artist’s Questionnaire.For fashion lovers, the 1990s have become associated with styles adopted by today’s supermodels and influencers, who never wear the same thing twice. Before he started, he “didn’t especially like Picasso,” he said. ![]() “At first I thought I would draw 10 and stop,” Tanaami said, but he kept going until he had produced close to 400. His studio, which sits just across the hall from the apartment he shares with his wife, is crammed full of the reimagined Picasso canvases, including one where he superimposed the face of “Astro Boy” - a robot character invented by his childhood hero, the Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka - onto the face of the child in Picasso’s original. The current exhibit features multiple pieces from a new “Pleasure of Picasso” series, for which Tanaami obsessively copied and reinterpreted some of the Spanish artist’s “Mother and Child” works. Speaking as if slightly bemused by his fame, he showed no signs of flagging energy even after two hours of talking. ![]() He regards himself as mostly a borrower rather than an inventor: “Eighty percent of my work is made from the influence of others,” said Tanaami, who wore a short-sleeved, sky blue Paul Smith button-down shirt imprinted with white pineapple silhouettes, khaki trousers and a tan beanie on his diminutive head. When he told his mother later that day about what he had seen, she accused him of lying, because she would have never let him out of her sight during an air raid. While Tanaami, now 86, did experience multiple Allied bombings during the war, he concocted that particular memory of terror in the field. Tanaami, recounting the memory decades later, said he even glimpsed the pilot in the cockpit as the plane flew across the field. In slow motion, she fell back to the ground. And then suddenly, a fighter plane shot her, blasting her into the air. As he cowered in the grass, a young woman in a red dress appeared, only her upper body visible. During World War II, when he had fled the capital with his mother and two brothers to escape the incessant firebombings, he recalls running to an open field after hearing an air raid siren. When I visited him recently at his Tokyo studio, Keiichi Tanaami, one of Japan’s premier pop artists, told me a horrific story from his childhood.
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