What is everyone talking about this week: Have we reached peak 90s nostalgia?
With an exhibition of the decade's most famous images opening at Tate Britain (and Oasis returning to Knebworth), could it be that 90s nostalgia is becoming a little cringe?
‘It’s not happening,’ tweeted Liam Gallagher after word of Oasis headlining Glastonbury took over the internet this summer — followed by a series of expletives we are too polite to spell out, even in asterisks. It did little to diminish their lead in the odds market: both he and brother Noel are notorious for denying reprisals until there is so much money on the table that it is impossible to say no. Their odds finally crashed two weeks ago after it was announced that Oasis would perform in Manchester on the same weekend as the Somerset festival. One assumes the financials were better.
Don’t fret if forced to pick the latter: Oasis will be back at Knebworth in Hertfordshire next September to mark 31 years since they set new records for live audience numbers in Britain. It has been a good year for the Mancunian duo: the announcement of a 38-date tour came hot off the heels of a documentary, Don’t Look Back In Anger, which premiered in Venice and returned the Gallaghers to the top of the odds market in a new category: most likely to compose the next Bond theme.
All this is not happening in a vacuum. Next month, Tate Britain will host an exhibition dedicated entirely to the cause: ‘The 90s: Art and Fashion’, curated by Edward Enninful (former editor of British Vogue) and featuring works by Juergen Teller and Corinne Day. The most heated debate at this year’s FT Weekend Festival was not the one about whether Gen Z could ever own a home, but one that asked which artist had made the best music of the 1990s. (For my money, I’d say Janet Jackson.)
Not so Cool Britannia: harking back to the good old days doesn't land so much with a younger generation that never experienced them.
There is reason to believe, however, that our nostalgia for the era has peaked. ‘I think young people are feeling nineties fatigue,’ says Rebecca Dolan, GQ’s associate features editor. ‘The shift happened this summer after so many brands, including M&S, released 1990s-inspired capsules following the success of Love Story on Disney+.’ Young people, she notes, ‘find these elaborate marketing campaigns quite cloying’. ‘It was fun, but I think I’m done with the 90s,’ wrote Tomo Delaney, a former Vogue staffer as he wound down his popular Instagram account, @90sLondon, earlier this month.
Some of the decade’s more serious incidents — the war in Kuwait, say, which turbocharged the cost of petrol — have resurfaced in the public consciousness as pundits seek to draw modern-day parallels. Short-lived nightclubs such as Lost, which sought to recapture the phone-free hedonism of the 1990s from an abandoned cinema in Soho, have closed. All this is unlikely to affect demand to see Oasis next year; yet the winds of change are hard to ignore. Trends, as per last week’s column, work in 30-year cycles. Let us hope, for their sake, that Liam and Noel are still around for another comeback in the 2050s.
This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
