In The Nineties

Nineties fashion--from grunge, to Clueless's Alaïa, to Margiela's new couture--is an essential reference point for contemporary style. This book, created in tandem with an exhibition at The Museum at FIT, documents the changing culture, attitudes, and creatives that ushered in our visual age. Minimalism. Deconstruction. The rejuvenation of established houses. These are just a few of the concepts that have come to define 1990s fashion. Others include an increased concern with environmentalism, developing technologies and the beginning of the fashion internet, freewheeling historical references, and a predilection for lifting significant styles from other cultures (the issues raised by this 'borrowing' are reviewed through a contemporary lens). In the twenty years since the decade ended, the fashion world has experienced several nineties revivals. Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the 90s focuses specifically on designers who challenged the expected appearance or workings of high fashion, and who played an important role in laying the foundation for fashion of the twenty-first century, including: Tom Ford, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors, Martin Margiela, Stella McCartney, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo, and Viktor & Rolf. Additional chapters address changes to fashion editorials and campaigns (under talents like Steven Meisel, Corinne Day, Inez & Vinoodh, Mark Borthwick, and Nan Goldin), a new theatricality to runway presentations, and the emergence of fashion theory as a field.

An instant New York Times bestseller! From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn’t know who it was. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. Beyond epiphenomena like "Cop Killer" and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a 90’s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it. In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany” make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

This book is a survey treatment of the 1990s. The trajectory of the narrative follows from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This book seeks to give a voice to historically marginalized communities, while providing an overview of the 1990s. The analysis includes examinations of: the end of the 1980s, America’s War in the Gulf, Bush’s domestic agenda; The 1992 Campaign, Clinton’s domestic agenda; The United States and genocide; globalization; science and technology; pop culture; race relations; LGBT and women’s right; and the scandals of the Clinton Administration. The book strikes the balance between providing an analysis of the 1990s, while providing the reader with basic key information about the decade. This book is one of the first of its kind to examine the whole decade and while providing an analysis on a multitude of subjects.

John Stokes's lively study is an exercise in interdisciplinary criticism inspired by the decade it observes, the decade of Wilde, Shaw, Beardsley, and Sickert. No longer dismissed as merely transitional between the Victorian and the Modern, the 1890s have now come to be recognized as unique—a period of dramatic engagement between high culture and popular forms, one medium and another, art and life. Spurning fixed boundaries, Stokes relates the controversial topics of the day—the status of the "New Journalism," the "degenerative" influence of Impressionist painting, the dubious morality of the music hall, the urgent need for prison reform, and the prevalence of suicide—to primary literary texts, such as The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Importance of Being Earnest, Jude the Obscure, and Portrait of a Lady. And in the process, he explores crucial areas of sociological and psychological interest: criminality, sexuality, madness, and "morbidity." Each of the book's six chapters opens with a look at the correspondence columns of daily newspapers and goes on, with a keen eye for the hidden link, to pursue a particular theme. Locations shift from Leicester Square and the Thames embankment to the Normandy coast and the Paris morgue and feature, along with famous names, a lesser known company of acrobats, convicts, aesthetes, "philistines," and mysterious suicides. Nearly a century later, John Stokes's unrivalled knowledge of how the arts actually functioned in the nineties makes this book a major contribution to modern cultural studies.

The year is 1983, and Chuck Klosterman just wants to rock. But he's got problems. For one, he's in the fifth grade. For another, he lives in rural North Dakota. Worst of all, his parents aren't exactly down with the long hairstyle which rocking requires. Luckily, his brother saves the day when he brings home a bit of manna from metal heaven, SHOUT AT THE DEVIL, Motley Crue's seminal paean to hair-band excess. And so Klosterman's twisted odyssey begins, a journey spent worshipping at the heavy metal altar of Poison, Lita Ford and Guns N' Roses. In the hilarious, young-man-growing-up-with-a-soundtrack-tradition, FARGO ROCK CITY chronicles Klosterman's formative years through the lens of heavy metal, the irony-deficient genre that, for better or worse, dominated the pop charts throughout the 1980s. For readers of Dave Eggers, Lester Bangs, and Nick Hornby, Klosterman delivers all the goods: from his first dance (with a girl) and his eye-opening trip to Mandan with the debate team; to his list of 'essential' albums; and his thoughtful analysis of the similarities between Guns 'n' Roses' 'Lies' and the gospels of the New Testament.

A sexual history of the 1990s when the Baby Boomers took over Washington, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue. A definitive look at the captains of the culture wars -- and an indispensable road map for understanding how we got to the Trump Teens. The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido examines the scandal-strafed decade when our public and private lives began to blur due to the rise of the web, reality television, and the wholesale tabloidization of pop culture. In this comprehensive and often hilarious time capsule, David Friend combines detailed reporting with first-person accounts from many of the decade's singular personalities, from Anita Hill to Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt to Heidi Fleiss, Alan Cumming to Joan Rivers, Jesse Jackson to key members of the Clinton, Dole, and Bush teams. The Naughty Nineties also uncovers unsung sexual pioneers, from the enterprising sisters who dreamed up the Brazilian bikini wax to the scientists who, quite by accident, discovered Viagra.

Fashion: Photography of the Nineties is a compilation of over two hundred images culled from the worlds of art and fashion. A chronicle of the fashion iconography of the Nineties, it places images familiar from magazines and style journals alongside their wilder, darker counterparts, many of which are published here for the first time. In these photographs the body and its gestures report on the defining characteristics of a decade. Postures of anxiety, insecurity and sexual uncertainty co-exist with fashion's more traditional celebrations. The ambiguity of gender and beauty lays bare our secret desires, dissolving the boundaries between what is worn and the way we wear it. Elegance and vulgarity, femininity and masculinity, art and fashion meet in the spaces separating the raw, the beautiful, the unkempt and the subversive. Out of the collision between style and the subconscious emerges a portrait of our time.

Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong? A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties with the new generation of students. An obscure power pop band wrestles with its new-found fame when its song "Blizzard of Summer" becomes an anthem for white supremacists. A couple considers getting a medical procedure that will transfer the pain of childbirth from the woman to her husband. A woman interviews a hit man about killing her husband but is shocked by the method he proposes. A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50. A man sees a whale struck by lightning, and knows that everything about his life has to change. A lawyer grapples with the unintended side effects of a veterinarian's rabies vaccination. Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. If Saul Steinberg and Italo Calvino had adopted a child from a Romanian orphanage and raised him on Gary Larsen and Thomas Bernhard, he would still be nothing like Chuck Klosterman. They might be good company, though. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it, it marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.