The Waif Silhouette

I want to approach this silhouette carefully, because it's as much about bodies as clothes, and its effects on how young women saw themselves were real. But it's impossible to understand 1990s fashion without it.

At the start of the decade, the fashion ideal was the supermodel: tall, healthy-looking, curvy, and glamorous. In 1990, a very different image appeared. The British photographer Corinne Day photographed a teenage Kate Moss for the magazine The Face - on a beach, barely made up, laughing, looking like an ordinary slim girl rather than a polished model. It felt fresh and real, and it launched a new ideal: very thin, pale, small-framed, and youthful.

The waif look was about fragility and naturalness. Clothes were simple and slight: slip dresses, little vests, sheer fabrics, cardigans, and flat shoes, often styled to look unstyled. Make-up was minimal or smudged, hair was lank or messy, and photographs were often shot in bare rooms or ordinary settings with a snapshot feel, which fitted the grunge mood and the minimalist side of fashion. Calvin Klein's advertising with Kate Moss helped carry the look into the mainstream.

By the middle of the decade, some fashion photography had taken this much further, with models who looked exhausted, gaunt, and unwell in bleak settings. Critics called it "heroin chic," arguing it glamorised drug use. In 1997, the death of the 20-year-old photographer Davide Sorrenti was widely blamed on heroin, and shortly afterwards President Bill Clinton publicly condemned the fashion industry for making heroin addiction look glamorous. The industry began to move away from the most extreme imagery.

The criticism of the waif look went beyond drugs. It raised hard questions about the pressure on young women to be very thin, and about eating disorders, which are still debated today. I think it's important to hold both things: the waif look was a genuine change in fashion imagery - more natural and less artificial than the 1980s - and it also set an ideal that was harmful for many people. That tension is part of its history.