The Spice Girls Changed Pop Forever in 1996. Thirty Years Later, Their Iconic Outfits Are on Display in a New Exhibition in London
The Barbican Music Library is celebrating British pop culture with a show that features Mel B’s leopard catsuit, Emma Bunton’s blue dress and Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack boots
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In 1996, Great Britain succumbed to “Spicemania.” The Spice Girls’ first album, Spice, broke sales records when it debuted that November, instantly cementing the girl group as pop royalty. Thirty years later, items worn by the band’s members are the highlight of a new exhibition celebrating what its curator calls the “wildest year of Britain’s wildest decade.”
Now on display at the Barbican Music Library in London, the celebration of “Cool Britannia” looks back at the music, fashion, sports and art that made 1996 a banner year in British pop culture. Visitors can get an up-close look at one of the most iconic outfits worn by Melanie Brown (Scary Spice): the leopard-print catsuit that she rocked while performing at the 1997 Brit Awards.
Per a statement from the City of London, the pop star says she remembers the night as a “glorious moment when we came home to celebrate a rollercoaster seven months after exploding from unknowns in July 1996 to feeling like we had conquered the world. It was all a crazy ’90s whirlwind, but in my leopard print, I knew I could take on anything.”
Other pieces of Spice Girls memorabilia on display in the show include the Union Jack platform boots once sported by Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice) and a blue dress worn by Emma Bunton (Baby Spice).
Fun fact: Twist and shout
Three decades before the Spice Girls, another pop music mania swept England: “Beatlemania,” the phrase used by the media to describe the “ecstatic, female-led fan culture surrounding the Beatles,” according to the Museum of Youth Culture.
The Spice Girls trace their origins to a newspaper advertisement announcing auditions for a new girl band in 1994. Four hundred girls showed up to try out at London’s Dancework Studios, and Halliwell, Brown, Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Victoria Adams rose to the top.
The girl group is synonymous with mainstream pop music today, but it broke the mold in many ways. As Tara Joshi wrote for Vice in 2016, the United Kingdom’s pop scene was dominated by male performers for much of the 1990s. The Spice Girls’ explosion onto the scene helped popularize the modern concept of “girl power” and pave the way for other female-forward acts that came after.
“While boy bands were devised to sing to girls, the Spice Girls sang with them,” Joshi wrote. “More to the point, they were working-class girls, pulled from various regional suburbs, that appealed directly to other working-class girls.”
In a 1997 interview with the Guardian’s Kathy Acker, the girls credited their group dynamic for their success. “There’s a chemistry that runs through us,” Adams (now Victoria Beckham) said. “Where I’m bad at something, Melanie’s good, or Geri’s good at something at which the rest of us are bad.”
“Collectively, we’ve got something going,” Halliwell added. “Individually, I don’t think we’d be that great.”
The Spice Girls’ retro outfits are just one component of the new exhibition. Also on display are a tambourine played by Liam Gallagher of Oasis and a Brit Award.
As Dominic Mohan, former editor of the Sun and the exhibition’s curator, says in the statement, his goal was to “capture that magical period when pop, rock, football, art, dance culture, food, the media and politics fused together spectacularly.”
“1996: A Celebration of the Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade—30 Years On” is on view through September 19 at Barbican Music Library in London.
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