Collection: FASHION MAGAZINES - 1990s

While the 1990s began with opulence and more traditionally feminine styles - remnants of the 1980s, a variety of influences from the music scene and youth culture (such as grunge, techno and girl power) as well as minimalism soon found their way into the fashion world, the latter of which was to dominate until the end of the decade.

Gianni Versace's designs are a great example of this development. Starting the 1990s with baroque opulence and colorful maximalism, his designs became sleeker and sleeker over the course of the decade. Versace was also instrumental in turning the 1990s into the decade of the supermodels - Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell didn't even get out of bed for less than 20,000 dollars a day. Alongside the rise of grunge, waifish Kate Moss conquered the fashion world and embodied the controversial heroin chic. She succeeded the amazonian supermodels and paved the way for more unconventional beauties such as Karen Elson, Maggie Rizer and Audrey Marnay.

Calvin Klein was not only the designer who contributed significantly to Kate Moss' success with his provocative campaigns for the perfume Obsession and his underwear. Together with Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, he also pioneered the minimalism trend that strongly shaped 1990s fashion. Minimalism peaked around 1998, when styles could not get any more minimal, and at the turn of the millennium a little more romance and hints of playful frills returned to fashion.

In the course of the1990s, traditional ideas of how a woman should dress and more conservative styles were ditched for good, and the quest for eternal youthfulness and sexiness became the center of attention. This was reflected in the imminent departure of old couturiers such as Hubert de Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent as well as the slow decline of fashion houses such as Emanuel Ungaro and Christian Lacroix that proposed more traditionally feminine aesthetics. Traditional houses signed up young and wild designers - Givenchy hired Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior appointed John Galliano, and Gucci hired Tom Ford - and these injected a lot of sex into their designs and the marketing of the brands, a development that would culminate in the first half of the 2000s.