People in the News

People in the News

Actress Jennifer Aniston, who portrayed Rachel on the TV show Friends inspired a craze in the mid 1990s for a longer version of the shag haircut. Women across the country demanded that their hairstylists give them the "Rachel" or Friends cut, a face-framing, multilayered look. Friends debuted in the 1994-1995 television season on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network and was still running at the end of the decade.

Carolyn Bessette made headlines, not just for marrying John F. Kennedy Jr. (son of President John F. Kennedy) on 21 September 1996, but for wearing a simple, yet elegant, white slip dress designed by Narciso Rodriguez. Bessette-Kennedy went on to become a symbol of the new American style with its clean, classic lines before she and her husband died in a plane crash on 16 July 1999.

Bill Blass retired at age seventy-seven after sixty years in the fashion business. Blass, an important figure on the American fashion scene for his classic styles, held his last show—his spring 2000 collection—in New York in October 1999.

Newsweek featured Diane Von Furstenberg on a cover in 1976 for her wrap dresses. The American designer enjoyed a revival of these 1970-style dresses in the mid 1990s.

Lizzy Gardiner was the perfect golden girl at the Academy Awards in 1995. The Australian designer, who won an Oscar for the costumes she and Tim Chappel designed for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), showed up at the ceremony in an evening dress made of 254 American Express Gold Cards.

Architect Michael Graves introduced a line of kitchen accessories to be sold through the Target chain of discount stores. The Graves Design Collection, which featured everything from spatulas to a patio set, went on sale in January 1999.

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), urban architect John Kaliskis private firm researched the histories of several Los Angeles neighborhoods in an effort to understand how urban sprawl developed. His idea was to make U.S. cities more livable with parks as well as to save their housing and community gardens.

Tom Kinslow and Simon Ungers designed the T-House in Wilton, New York. The structure, built with quarter-inch oxidized nickel chromium steel in a simple geometric form, combined the client's request to have living quarters (in the lower section) and a library (in the top section).

The young rap duo Kriss Kross drew as much attention for their dress as their music. Daddy Mack (Chris Smith) and Mack Daddy (Chris Kelly), both thirteen, wore their baseball caps, T-shirts, and overalls backward. They called it "the krossed-out look." Most called it short-lived.

Pop singer Madonna and Jean-Paul Gaultier teamed up for her 1990 "Blond Ambition Tour." Gaultier designed Madonna's provocative outfits, including a cone-shaped bra.

Stella McCartney, daughter of a former Beetle Paul McCartney and his American-photographer wife, Linda Eastman McCartney, made her Paris runway debut in October 1996 at age twenty-five as the new designer for the House of Chloé.

American designer Isaac Mizrahi gave the public an inside look into the world of fashion with his 1995 movie Unzipped.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, with her fresh face, minimal makeup, no fuss hair, and classic styles, set new standards for beauty and fashion in the mid and late 1990s. When she appeared on the August 1996 cover of Vogue, the magazine declared her "the nineties It girl."

Designer Patrick Robinson made his debut collection for Anne Klein in April 1995. Robinson, twenty-eight at the time, replaced Richard Tyler at the helm of Anne Klein, one of the biggest design houses in the United States.

In 1990 New York architect Robert A. M. Stern introduced his designs in a line of seating and tables for Hickory Business Furniture. The twenty or so new pieces were all crafted in wood and featured clean lines that blended classic styling with innovation.

The March 1990 issue of Vogue listed among its "Designers to watch in the 1990s" Zang Toi, José Barrera, Mark Badgley, James Mischka, Todd Oldham, Maria Snyder, and Christian Francis Roth.

Architect Robert Venturi, who launched postmodernism in the 1960s, had his addition to the National Gallery of Art on Trafalgar Square in London dedicated in 1991; in 1992 Seattle opened the Venturi-designed Seattle Art Museum.

Author Naomi Wolf, a graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar, challenged the marketing of unrealistic beauty standards in her book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991).