Great clothes, no Instagram — was this last ‘best decade ever’?

One of the stranger trends on the discussion platform Reddit highlights just how many variations there are on this one question: why did the Nineties look like that? Most of the time the people posing them are too young to remember 9/11, let alone the years immediately preceding it. But they share a fascination with the photographs taken of that decade, and the clothes, and the makeup.

Sometimes the question is about the era’s cars, or its architecture, or its films and television. What was up with how good everything looked? Why did light seem that much kinder? Why do street scenes in the original Sex and the City hold so much colour and vibrance, yet the street scenes in And Just Like That look as if you’re watching Sarah Jessica Parker skip around an Apple store? Why, the children ask, do the Nineties just seem... better?

It’s a tiny microcosm of what is increasingly accepted as a fact of modern life: that the Nineties were better than whatever we’re dealing with currently. Think of all the music and the filmmaking! Put aside the Gulf war, Aids, the Rodney King riots, OJ Simpson, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Bosnia, mad cow disease, increased globalisation and corporate fiefdom, and the dawn of focus-on-the-family conservatism, and it was practically a blissful utopia of good vibes! And you, dear reader, may be one of those pining nostalgia-heads, sitting in your cramped, hopeless, still-traumatised-by-Covid flatshare and wishing you could go back.

Monica Lewinsky

Others echo that view, at least. A few years ago, a YouGov poll found that the Nineties were the UK’s most fondly remembered decade. A similar poll, published earlier this month, identified the period between 1993 and 2001 as one of the two best eras in American history, more or less tying with 1980 to 1991. Make America great again? Just make it 1995, and Bob’s your uncle, apparently. That poll, though, doesn’t make clear who the 1,139 Americans were who actually voted. We know they were “adults”, but that could mean anything: individuals who lived through the Nineties — and by that I mean really lived — or people like me, 1992 babies with vivid memories of only the last hurrah of the decade. If we’re being totally honest, they could also be people with absolutely no tangible sense of the Nineties outside of Throwback Thursday Instagram posts. Eighteen-year-olds, basically.

But why do the Nineties still hold such allure? They were, in lots of ways, a decade of abundance, of every creative field firing on all cylinders. Of Nirvana, Tupac, Blur and the Spice Girls, of Quentin Tarantino, Jurassic Park and Richard Curtis. Think Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein and Empire Records. The Simpsons, Twin Peaks and Father Ted. There was money and time being thrown at artists of all stripes, allowing each and every person to discover something of value and significance in the decade’s cultural wares. Real investment was put into Caroline Aherne and Larry David, into the Gallagher brothers and Britney Spears. It was easy to find your stuff because there was simply so much of it. Not keen on Alanis? Try Kim Gordon. Repelled by Men Behaving Badly? Try Absolutely Fabulous. In a random week in June 1999, the top 10 singles in the UK included “Hey Boy Hey Girl” by The Chemical Brothers, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” by Shania Twain, “Sweet Like Chocolate” by Shanks & Bigfoot, and Sixpence None the Richer’s treacly classic “Kiss Me”. At No 1? Baz Luhrmann’s misty-eyed, spoken-word oddity “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”. There was range. The internet, inevitably, ruined it. Popularised by hippies and geeks around 1993 and 1994, it created even more abundance, but going backwards in time: increasingly the entire history of culture was available at our disposal, shrinking the necessity for the new and innovative.