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As Virgin Express celebrates 10 years of business we decided to take a look back ten years to see what was going on in fashion, film, technology and sport
Prada and prints
Prada in ’96 was all about the spectacular praise of the seventies. The autumn/winter show heralded great prints of that decade, and brought together the best in brown, yellow, orange and often a combination of the lot. The collection secured designer Miuccia Prada’s as queen of newly found chic – at the time.
Lacroix and a colour clash
Big hair and a riot of multicoloured fabrics and prints. A wild festival to the eye and just what Lacroix stood for then: lots of dash and colour and very couture-like.
Comme des Garçons and candy hair
Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind the trendy Japanese label, was into candy hair back then. The clothes were very colourful – an exception to the rule- as if she had fallen into a playful and childish but also very romantic mood.
W<
Antwerp based designer Walter Van Beirendonck was still designing his
W< collection for the Mustang jeans group in 1996, doing the most spectacular shows, in which he depicted boys and girls of the future. Back then, he already loved colourful pullovers, and even dresses for men.
Transparency
Diaphanous see-through clothing was a major hit, whether it was a bra under a shirt, or transparent trousers like these (pictured opposite) by Miyake, the Japanese designer who would conquer the next decade with his Pleats Please line. Veerle Windels
Motorola StarTAC
The forerunner of today’s ultra popular RAZR phones the Motorola StarTAC was the first mobile in which the maker invested as much effort in the design as the functionality. Based loosely on the Communicators from the Star Trek TV series the clamshell style handset was also the first phone to feature a vibrate option as well as a ring-tone.
Fujitsu PDS-4201
Flat screen plasma TV sets are everywhere these days and most people probably consider them to be a recent innovation. Not so, Fujitsu were first to debut a plasma screen TV in 1996 with the PDS-4201 a 42-incher that sold for an astonishing €17,500. Within a couple of years all the TV big boys had produced rivals sets and plasma was here to stay.
Psion Series 3C
The must-have geek gadget was the just launched 3C organiser from the British company Psion. It had a wonderful keyboard, software that enabled it to hook up to your PC and lots of other features. The company stopped making organisers for consumers a few years back, but its legacy lives on in the guise of the operating system used on some Nokia and Sony Ercisson phones.
Tamagotchi
Along with ‘mad for it’ the other most heard phrase was probably ‘have you fed the Tamagotchi?’ The egg-shaped, ever needy plastic toy was launched in Japan in 1996 and soon become a huge hit with the young, and not so young. Mercifully it proved quite a short-lived craze.
PlayStation
While all the talk in the gaming world today is of the PS3, back then European gamers had only just got their mitts on the joystick of the original PlayStation. A huge hit from day one, the PlayStation has become the most popular home games console and helped popularise games such as TombRaider, Resident Evil and Gran Turismo. Ashley Norris
Oscar action
France’s Juliette Binoche finally brought her beauty, grace and talent to the notice of the entire world when she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in The English Patient. Anthony Minghella’s film swept to victory at the Oscars too, earning Best Film and Best Director. There was nothing, however, for the lead actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who lost out to Frances McDormand’s comical policewoman Marge in The Coen Brothers’ Fargo.
Everyone’s saying
Show Me The Money!’ – a catchphrase taken from Tom Cruise’s film about a rapacious sports agent, Jerry Maguire.
Czech success
Hearts melted around the globe as Kolya won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, a touching Czech film about a grumpy cellist caring for a cute five-year-old (Andrej Chalimon) after his mother defects to the West.
Evita
Madonna actually won an award for acting! The Golden Globes deemed her performance as Eva Peron in Evita worthy of her first acting honours. Madonna retrained her voice to sing the part in the film of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s popular stage musical and attracted controversy filming in Buenos Aires and insisted on casting Antonio Banderas as the chorus, after admitting having had a crush on the Spanish star for years. Alan Parker was hired to direct the film, co-scripting it with Oliver Stone. To this day, both these strong characters bear scars from working with the singer. All together now - don’t cry for me, Argentina....
Piano man
Rachmaninov was back... Australian film Shine won an Oscar for Geoffrey Rush, a little-known actor who was once Mel Gibson’s room mate. The success of the film, based on the life of autistic Australian piano genius David Helfgott, boosted sales in classical piano music and brought the reclusive musician out of retirement to undertake a brief live concert tour of Europe.
At Cannes
British director Mike Leigh enjoyed his biggest hit with Secrets and Lies winning the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film, about a London woman who gets a shock when the daughter she gave up for adoption years ago tracks her down, also earned actress Brenda Blethyn the honours on the Croisette. The film sparked a trend for people calling each other “sweed’ard”, mimicking the distinctive way the character pronounced the word sweetheart.
Summer blockbusters
The world was under attack from aliens as Independence Day became the big blockbuster hit of the summer. The tongue-in-cheek, big budget B movie stole the thunder from the disaster movie Twister and even out-performed Tom Cruise’s first foray in to Mission Impossible territory. Jason Solomons
Ten years on and we’re still....
>> Watching Tom Cruise doing Mission Impossible (number 3 is out later this year)
>> Watching black comedians try to win family audiences by putting on fat suits (Eddie Murphy in Nutty Professor and now Martin Lawrence in Big Momma’s House 2)
>> Talking about films called Crash (David Cronenberg’s 1996 film caused controversy in England, being banned in several cinemas, and this year Paul Haggis’ film of the same name featured on most awards lists)... plus ça change... JS
Bosman controversy
Jean-Marc Bosman changed football forever after the European Court of Justice ruled the midfielder was free to move from Club de Liege to Dunkerque. A new verb was born – “doing a Bosman” – coming to signify a player who opted to let his contracts run down before joining another club for free, with no transfer fee involved. Ajax, who lost the 1996 Champions League final to Juventus, were hit particularly hard, seeing a number of players leaving for Italian and Spanish clubs without receiving a penny.
Tour de France
Having previously won the competition five times, Miguel Indurain’s Tour de France domination came to an end, with the Spaniard finishing in 11th place. The Spaniard, who twice won both the Tour and the Giro d’Italia in the same year, won Olympic gold at Atlanta in a time trial. Just as significantly, 1996 was also the year Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer. A whole new incredible chapter was about to begin.
Tennis
Boris Becker won his last Grand Slam final, beating Michael Chang Down Under to lift the Australian Open. An injured Steffi Graf was denied the chance to repeat Becker’s trick, missing out on the Australian tournament for the second year running, but recovered to win the year’s other three majors, including a stunning French Open victory against Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.
Valentino Rossi
The livewire Italian won his first Moto GP 10 years ago. Such is his dominance of the sport, motorcycle racing without Rossi is unimaginable these days. Zipping around the globe on his souped-up Yamaha, Rossi is a true showman. Rumours of a switch to four wheels grow stronger by the year; certainly the increasingly lacklustre world of F1 could do with an injection of Rossimania.
Atlanta Olympics
Two iconic images from the 1996 summer games: Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic cauldron and the aftermath of the terrorist bomb that killed one and injured 110 people at a concert in the Centennial Olympic Park. On the track, Marie-José Pérec won the 200m and broke the 400m Olympic record, while Michael Johnson became the first man in the games’ history to win at both distances, breaking the 200m world record in the process. Matt Barker
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