10 Fashion Trends That Will Transport You Back to the '90s

The short and floaty babydoll dress mixed childlike style with rebellion, making it one of the decade’s more controversial trends. In 1994, New York Times fashion critic Suzy Menkes described the look as “party frocks with little-girl cardigans and mommy-dress-up jewelry. … Is there anything more perverse and weird than grown women wearing kiddie clothes?”

Still, she noted, designers didn’t shy away from the trend. Babydoll styles showed up that season in collections from Anna Sui, Giorgio Armani and others. "I was trying hard to make fashion fun," Sui told Menkes. "When I was out in L.A. opening my store, a lot of younger women were wearing little-girl dresses. I thought they looked so sexy. But my inspiration was very positive and innocent.”

The trend also came from the music world. Courtney Love’s flouncy dresses, plastic barrettes and combat boots became part of the kinderwhore aesthetic associated with grunge and riot grrrl style, an underground feminist punk movement. “The look is one that represents an uprising of feminism and also ties into subcultures that span across generations into the ’90s,” Elle magazine reports.

“While grunge and minimalism tend to get most of the attention, I think hip-hop deserves equal credit for its influence,” Jenkins says. She points out that different subgenres had different looks—a luxury-leaning style from artists like the Notorious B.I.G., and a more minimalist, socially aware approach from groups like A Tribe Called Quest. 

Hip-hop fashion also grew through close ties between artists and designers. “Brands such as Tommy Hilfiger collaborated directly with hip-hop artists, while designers like April Walker of Walker Wear, along with FUBU and Cross Colours, built movements through an intimate relationship with the culture,” Jenkins says. 

She adds that hip-hop’s reach went well beyond the music itself. The style also spread through TV and movies.  “It's worth noting that hip-hop's influence extended across television and film as much as fashion—LL Cool J was masterful at this because he was at the intersection of all three—turning style on screen into style on the street.” 

When it came to hair accessories, inexpensive, colorful butterfly clips were all the rage. “They're small, versatile, and packed with personality,” Southern Living reports. Butterfly clips were often used to pin back sections of hair at the crown, keeping strands away from the face and eyes.

Stars like Kirsten Dunst, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Melissa Joan Hart helped popularize the look, often wearing several clips at a time. The style became a staple of teen fashion and showed up everywhere from school hallways to red carpets.  

Chokers had been around for centuries, but they made a big return to fashion in the 1990s. Even Princess Diana wore one in 1994, pairing a pearl-and-sapphire choker with her now-famous “revenge dress,” worn after Prince Charles publicly admitted his affair.  

The collar-like necklace took off in many styles. “Tattoo” stretch-plastics, velvet ribbons, rhinestone strands, leather bands and goth-inspired versions showed up on red carpets, teen TV shows and in clubs and malls. “Wearing a choker is a bit of drama," fashion curator Alexandra Palmer told the CBC.

Grunge wasn’t just a music genre; it was a 1990s aesthetic, and flannel shirts, often tied around the waist, were part of the uniform. 

“Grunge became ‘fashion’ when it was sent down the Perry Ellis runway by Marc Jacobs in 1993,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robin Givhan in Elle magazine.  “It was the collection that got Jacobs fired but also the one that established his reputation as frightfully cool, independent and prescient.”

Givhan adds that grunge clothes "felt of the moment and free of all the assumptions that had always been attached to luxury fashion. It wasn’t grown up. It was a paean to disaffected youth.”

Minimalism was a major look in the ’90s. The slip dress, with its thin straps, bias cut and simple shape, was worn by many of the decade’s biggest stars, from Kate Moss to Gwyneth Paltrow to Jennifer Aniston. “Even Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s wedding gown, which was fitted at the hips and puddled lightly on the floor, was a slip dress,” Vogue reports. 

“By the ’90s, designers like Calvin Klein were popularizing the slip dress, while Donna Karan favored muted colors and minimalist silhouettes,” Jenkins says. “Both reflected a move away from the maximalism of the 1980s, where embellishment, sharp silhouettes and attention-grabbing details had defined that decade."

“That era of the ’90s was about quiet, low-key dress: quality and simple silhouette over ornamentation," Jenkins explains. Retailers like the Gap made simple wardrobe staples popular with everyday shoppers.

Skate culture went mainstream in the 1990s, helped by movies like Gleaming the Cube (1989), Kids (1995) and Clueless (1995), as well as music acts like the Beastie Boys and Bad Religion. Baggy jeans, oversized T-shirts for men, shrunken tees for girls and skate sneakers quickly spread from skate parks in New York and Los Angeles to schools and malls across the country. 

“Perhaps skating’s greatest legacy came in the form of clothing, where the chunky-soled plimsolls adopted to cushion skaters’ feet were firmly planted in the social consciousness and the easy, oversized outfits worn in the halfpipes came to shape the silhouette of the era,” writes Jim Merrett for luxury men’s website MR PORTER.

“In the early 1990s, the mini-backpack was a fashion ‘must-have,’” the Los Angeles Times reports, pointing to the “Lolita” style from Agnès B. and Prada’s nylon version as two of the decade’s most sought-after styles. 

Vogue adds that the shrunken backpack got a huge boost from Clueless, in which characters Cher, Dionne and Tai carried them throughout the movie. “While the cell phones back then weren’t nearly as compact as they are today, the trio still managed to squeeze them into their stylish mini bags along with other important high school essentials,” the magazine notes. 

Platform shoes existed long before the 1990s, but they saw a resurgence in popularity during the decade, according to Women’s Wear Daily.

Shown on high-end designer runways, including Vivienne Westwood’s 1993 show (where supermodel Naomi Campbell famously tripped in her towering platforms), pop stars like the Spice Girls also opted for sky-high shoes. But it was Steve Madden’s cushioned “Slinky Sandal,” which, WWD reports, “won the hearts of tweens and teens of the ’90s.”

The baby tee—a tight, cropped, shrunken T-shirt—was a late-decade staple. It appeared on TV shows, in movies and in mall stores nationwide. Celebrities like Drew Barrymore, Reese Witherspoon, Britney Spears and Tyra Banks helped make the shirts mainstream, often sporting designs with slogans or cutesy sayings.