Celebrating a Very Fashionable Middle Age

There is a scene in the second episode of the compulsively watchable and entirely self-hagiographic new fashion docuseries, “In Vogue: The ’90s,” in which Anna Wintour describes London as the “place you went to look for the best talent.”

Although — as the current 40th-birthday-of-fashion-week celebrations in London reflect — the collections were officially organized in 1984, it was the shows of the late ’90s and early 2000s that really put the local scene on the international map. They were fashion week’s equivalent of raging adolescence: a period of great chaos, intensity and transformation.

That was when Lee Alexander McQueen was upending and dazzling expectations showing one collection that involved ink spreading through an acrylic runway and models doused in rain, so their clothes stuck to their bodies and mascara ran down their faces, and another set around a glass-box pseudo-sanatorium, with live moths being released during the finale.

When Hussein Chalayan addressed issues of immigration and women’s rights with shows that involved tables and chair slipcovers turning into dresses, and an array of chadors that became progressively shorter until they revealed a model naked, except for her face. When Julien Macdonald closed a show with Scary Spice (now Mel B), and the Jagger girls (Jade and Elizabeth) walked the runways along with aristo-models such as Stella Tennant and Honor Fraser. When Britpop and the YBAs (young British artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) and fashion were so intertwined that in 1997, Vanity Fair unveiled its “Cool Britannia” cover, with Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher snuggled up under a Union Jack blanket.

This was predigital fashion and presocial media. If people wanted to see what was happening, they had to show up in person, rush from old warehouse to decrepit bus depot, and stand around in giant crowds outside long past the official entry time before pushing their way in and waiting some more.