94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al-Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.

— Jake Vander-Ark

Ahh, the 90s I hated ye when I was in it, but I love it now that it's gone...

— Allison B. Levine

Anna Wintour hadn't been to any of McQueen's shows, and McQueen didn't like it. McQueen said American Vogue could borrow the dress only if they flew it to New York and back, in its own seat, with an escort. It was a fuck-you, and they took it, and the dress was shot by Richard Avedon. "Fashion people haven't got any brains," McQueen said.

— Maureen Callahan

As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter.

— Maureen Callahan

I think of myself as a political idiot. Idiot, in Ancient Greece, denoted a common person without access to knowledge and information--all women, by definition, and most men. I am unable to make judgments. I see no options I can identify with. Is that normal?

— Jasmina Tešanović

Novelists,’ said IPO, ‘are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties… Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actually reads novels anymore, but it’s a fashionable thing to be a novelist – as long as you don’t entertain people of course. I sometimes think,’ said IPO, his eyes like industrial diamonds, ‘that my sole virtue is, I’m the only person in London who has no intention of writing any kind of novel, ever.

— Amanda Craig

One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.

— Rob Sheffield

She's all brute force and '90s clichés.

— Rainbow Rowell

That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)

— Eve Kagan

What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modelled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials.

— Maureen Callahan