Style director Ruth Sleatholm also acknowledges this marked move towards tempering decoration. ‘There is a prompt to pull simple design pieces to help achieve a balanced, sophisticated end result. It’s nice to have a flourish, a scallop, a wave but it got to the point where unnecessary additions masked bad proportions.’ George Morgan’s first furniture collection, consisting of 11 pieces, was a recent standout for Ruth and a manifesto born of a desire to frame her projects with furniture that didn’t fight for attention. ‘There’s a trend to make things that are whimsical or narrative,’ says George. ‘What I have created is the antidote. It’s about being well-made, quiet. I want my “standard” chair to not have too much of an opinion.’ ‘He was very intentional about it,’ adds Ruth.
Tom Dixon, Habitat’s creative director during the 1990s and responsible for introducing collaborations with Achille Castiglioni and Ingvar Kamprad, has always embraced hard materials like copper, steel and cast iron. He thinks it can be hard to be fanatical with everything on Pinterest in today’s environment, but, with what he describes as a ‘huge soup of possibilities’, the more you pick up a few limbs and use them together, the better the end result will be. ‘It’s not about being in the middle but about using both extremes,’ he adds. ‘So if I’m working with a fabric, it’s the thickest, thickest fabric for upholstery in really saturated colors.’
So what is it about the late 1990s that resonates in recent years? Richard Benson, editor The Face Between 1995 and 1998, I think what people express in terms of appreciation for that time is that there was a lack of self-consciousness, a lack of ‘overthinking’ about anything. ‘You can feel a lot of human connection in those paintings,’ he says of the many visual references provided by the era. As Lucinda points out, it’s understandable given you only had one shot: ‘It wasn’t altered in post-production.’ And naturally it always ‘created a kind of panic, a tension and a sense of anticipation that was really fantastic’. At Laura Craik, fashion editor The Face In the 1990s (also guardian And evening standard) recalls that stylists and photographers could shoot what they wanted: ‘There was no command from above, no need to shoot a complete designer look from one brand, which could often look sterile.’
