Each of the past three centuries has its version of fashion’s last decade somewhere in them, and yet they are all rather thematically similar – a shucking off, a clearing away, a simplifying to make way for a redefinition of what excess can actually later mean within a new political and cultural landscape about to dawn at the turn of a newer century, not a last gasp as much as a final sigh.

There is indeed a ’90s through-line from the neoclassicism of 1790s Regency fashion with its high-waisted muslin dresses worn with few undergarments and, yes, a shucking away of corsets until they were to return in the next century, to the 1890s John Singer Sargent portrait of I.N. Phelps Stokes and his wife Edith (Edie Sedgwick’s aunt), a stunningly glamorous take on the clearing away of the clutter that fashion can often foist into our lives by their  insisting on wearing informal outdoor attire for the formal portrait, to the iconic Oscar red-carpet moment in the 1990s when Sharon Stone arrived wearing a Vera Wang skirt with a crisp white shirt from the Gap. Each of those centuries’ last decades signaled to us that there can be an ease to wearing clothes that elides with elegance.

The Calvin Klein spring 1994 collection turned the 20th Century’s final sigh into simply-cut slip dresses made to lounge around in as if they were the lingerie they resembled in their layering. He said of the collection that “nothing is stiff,” which was not only an admission of his relief at not having to be so oppressively sexual all the time in his branding, but also that the styles he put forward that season, lacking that overt, ramped-up sexuality, were instead more deeply sensual as they wafted down the runway along with his waif-like muse, Kate Moss. Calvin claimed that the 1990s were going to be “about the personal, about staying in and being alone, and not flaunting what you have on your back.”

Marc Jacobs had taken it all one step too far only the year before, according to fashion critics of the time. His legendary Spring 1993 Perry Ellis collection, now known as his “grunge show” in November 1992, was not a century’s simplifying sigh, but the kind of shrugging shout and shoving-aside of an old order indigenous to rockers who pretend they don’t care about such things as fashion as they preen about in any spotlight offered them. That grunge show was both incongruous and incredible in the way great rock concerts can be when what appears to be disruption is, in fact, fine-tuned and orchestrated, a melange of downbeats and uplift, a palette of mixed patterns and plushness masquerading as pleasure. Jacobs was demanding that we look away from ourselves toward the streets and the larger cultural moment; he was accusing the fashion world of being too haunted by the past and too worried about the future.  Look to the present, he advised them. The 1990s was the moment in the past when we began to see the present anew.

This seemed, with that grunge show that has come to define the decade for fashion aficionados, to be Jacobs saying the awful, vulgar 1980s are over and it is time for a new kind of reimagined, much younger vulgarity. On cue, the critical elders of the time recoiled. Many think of the 1990s as the decade of Calvin and Kelly – as well as Ralph and Ricky – fashion’s reigning two couples at the end of the 20th century, the naughty and the nice, the sleek and the preppie, the amicable and amorous who made being an American really rather marvelous in a worldwide way and so deeply pleasing to the eye. But Jacobs set out to make it about Courtney and Kurt, a couple messier in its American magnificence. It was a sense of America and its fashion with its doors thrown open and its closets seen. The critical establishment might have revolted itself against Jacobs’ declaration of some revolutionary ideas about what fashion really is  – a culture’s mirror, not a narcissist’s one – but the CFDA awarded him its Womenswear Designer of the Year in 1992.

Donna Karan, who was given the CFDA Founder’s Award in 2016, further streamlined the streamlined decade when her Seven Easy Pieces – the needed antithesis of vulgarity, a cleansing of the fashion palate and its palette – caught on because she understood the way women desired to dress in order to carry them from their daytime lives to lives lived at night. Her bodysuit – which came from her dedication to her yoga practice – was a staple of her aesthetic; she put stretch into the fashion world’s consciousness. And her cutout shoulder dress was worn by both Liza Minnelli to the Oscars in 1992 and by Hillary Clinton to her first State Dinner at the White House in 1993.

Marc Jacobs, after throwing down a fashion gauntlet, was later to take up one and helped lead the way to a more worldwide – evenly worldly – acceptance of American fashion designers when he became the Creative Director of Louis Vuitton in 1997. That same year Michael Kors took over Celine where he remained until 2004. Narciso Rodriguez, who became a globally recognized name after designing Carolyn Bessette’s wedding dress, went to Cerutti and, then, Loewe. Tom Ford began the decade making his entry at Gucci and added to his portfolio at the decades’ end by taking over YSL. He left both houses in 2004 to focus on his own label.  But it was Ford’s 1996 fall collection that began to reconfigure the decade itself – ripe for reconfiguring since we all were waif-weary by then – in his own image of a well-honed, full-bodied hedonism. Sybarites swooned and glommed on to his take on fin-de-siècle glamour and sex appeal. There was the feel of Bond girls – Bond women – being better at being James Bond than James Bond ever was. His was the kind of redefining of, yes, vulgarity for which the fashion world had been longing through grunge and upholstery patterns and Karan’s more carefully curated response to it – (b)lithely dangerous, unafraid of thighs, luxurious, room even for some wit in its wantonness. He gave a pulse back to pulchritude.

There are other fashion moments from the decade that gave us Sex and the City (thank you, Betsey Johnson and Sarah Jessica Parker) and cargo pants (no thanks) and a conical-breasted Madonna in Jean-Paul Gaultier. But one of my favorite ones was when Versace asked Tupac to walk his runway for his Fall/Winter 1996/97 show which presaged hip-hop’s burgeoning influence on fashion. It was a last hurrah for both men who would die violent deaths soon after and wounded the rest of the decade which has to find a way to carry on.  It did so resplendent with Kangol caps and Timberland boots and baggy T-shirts and sportswear and lots of FUBU and Donatella’s damn-it-all full-speed-ahead assertive aesthetic that taken together became a reassertion of life made up of the mash-up of culture and and rap and remembrance. Rap lyrics are resplendent themselves with fashion references. The names most frequently mentioned according to genius.com are Gucci, Prada, Versace, and Louis Vuitton. “I don’t pop molly, I rock Tom Ford,” Jay Z even sings on his rap anthem, “Tom Ford.”

“I don’t think fashion has to change every five minutes. I’d like these to be clothes you can wear for a long time – ten, 20 years – then pass on to your daughter,” said Ford about one of his collections in the 1990s. “Why buy vintage when you can open your own closet.” The 1990s.  Timeless yet vintage. Sigh.