I Love The ’90s: The Decade’s Most Legendary Music Makers And Their Watches

This summer, we can’t help but notice a lot of end-of-the-20th century nostalgia in pop culture. From Netflix’s Fear Street to Courtney Love accusing Olivia Rodrigo of copying the cover of Hole’s 1994 album Live Through This. Even Bennifer and Britney are making headlines again. But as long as Jonathan Taylor Thomas’ center-parted haircut doesn’t make a comeback, we are into it.

This moment has brought back fond memories of the music and the watches of the 1990s, so Watchonista thought we’d go back to the OG influencers to make a playlist of some unforgettable artists and their watches.

This British quartet spent the 1980s as a synth-pop band but reinvented itself as something deeper and darker with 1990’s Violator, an album that mixed electronic elements with grittier guitars. Lady Gaga, The Crystal Method, and Shakira have all cited Violator as a major influence on their music. The incomparable Johnny Cash even covered “Personal Jesus” in 2002.
 

They’re Hublot ambassadors now, but the members of Depeche Mode have always been fond of ground-breaking timepieces. In the ’90s, songwriter Martin Gore could be seen sporting a Citizen Aqualand Promaster, reference C0023. The Aqualand was also a techno pioneer as it was the first watch to incorporate a reliable electronic digital depth gauge.
 

With the release of Nevermind in 1991, Nirvana redefined not just rock music but also fashion. You could even go so far as to call the band’s wardrobe anti-fashion as it consisted of mostly thrift shop finds.

According to friends and photos from around the time of the taping of their 1993 Unplugged album and video, lead singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain was partial to one watch and one watch only – a Hong Kong-manufactured piece with the face of Tom Peterson, a Seattle-area car dealer, on the dial.
 

One reason that the 1990s wields such influence in the 2020s is that musically it was so diverse. You had rough-edged riot grrrls like Babes in Toyland and L7 spreading their feminist punk message through the underground. There were boundary-breaking artists like Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim lighting up the charts and preaching sex-positive feminism with their lyrics. And, on the other end of the spectrum, there was polished pop of the Spice Girls. All of these acts promoted the concept of “girl power,” in one way or another, and upset outdated notions of what feminine was and wasn’t.
 

Of course, on the fashion front, these women were also style icons. For example, Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton wore a pink Baby-G, a scaled-down version of Casio’s rugged and bulky G-SHOCK. Fun Fact: Both the Baby-G and the Spice Girls debuted in 1994. And for many millennials, the friendship between the watch and the music has never ended.
 

Remember “new country”? For a while, crossover acts like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain had phenomenal success on mainstream radio. And the coolest of the country cats was Dwight Yoakam. He sold more than 30 million records and recorded five Billboard No. 1 albums, twelve gold albums, and nine platinum albums, including the triple-platinum This Time. The king of Hollywood Honky Tonk, Yoakam also had a respectable acting career and briefly dated Sharon Stone.

Yoakam’s popularity also led to a stint as a spokesperson for Ebel watches.
 

By 1997, many had already written Radiohead off as a one-hit-wonder (thanks to the alternative chart-topping track “Creep”). But then the band released OK Computer. Since then, the experimental album has been hailed as one of the greatest records of all time.

Reviewers described the album as “anti-commercial,” “millennial,” and “futuristic.” That could also describe the wristwatch singer Thom Yorke was most often pictured wearing at the time, which appears to be a Casio Cognit Schema Calculator Watch.