Ilius Ahmed set up his Instagram account, Unforgettable Runway, back in 2019, and since then has filled it with clips of runway shows taken from his extensive archive of VHS tapes—tapes that he received from fashion houses some 30 years ago, which they sent out as promotional material, when he was still a teenager, and which he has since been busy digitizing. The period the account covers is pretty specific: The mid-’80s to the mid-’90s. In other words, that high-glam era which saw the birth, and then the reign, of the supermodels—that first-name-is-enough time of Linda! Christy! Helena! Nadege! And Claudia!—though my own favorite clips are of Tina! (as in Turner), who walked an Azzedïne Alaia show in 1988, now on Unforgettable Runway in all its slightly fuzzy glory. Otherwise, all my other fave moments are of Yasmeen! (as in Ghauri) who walks like no other mortal being on this earth—well, on a runway, at least. (As it turns out, Ahmed is also a Ghauri superfan.)
“I thought, ‘What would spark inspiration for the name [of my account],’” Ahmed said over Zoom the other week from his home in Coventry. “For me, it was such an unforgettable era—it’s these moments of history—so I started to post clips after seeing some snippets of fashion on Instagram. I pick things that were significant to me at that time, that hold a memory for me. You could say, ‘But what about your audience…?’” The simple truth, of course, is that Ahmed’s obsession with the runway shows of yesteryear has found an audience because his Instagram account speaks to all of us who are equally obsessed.
And, frankly, how could you not be? The clips on Unforgettable Runway are pure gold: The strutting, the spinning, the synchronization—who doesn’t love seeing a phalanx of supers navigating the runway with as much cheerily choreographed brio as a Broadway show? And when you add in the opportunity to see rare footage of shows from Karl Lagerfeld (Chanel and his own label), Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood, Thierry Mugler, Rifat Ozbek, Martine Sitbon, and Christian Lacroix, among others, well…. the scrolling comes fast and furious. (Ahmed’s personal zenith, show-wise? Versace, fall 1991/2.)
It’s the near-history-ness of it all that makes Unforgettable Runway so fascinating: It’s at once close enough to today to be memorable (well, for some of us, at least), and yet it also feels oddly far away—largely because there was so little dissemination of shows back then, with no iPhones, no social media, and no internet to speak of: Just a bunch of analog runway images used for magazines and newspapers, and some fragments of shows glimpsed on a TV screen, if you were lucky. Unforgettable Runway brings the barely seen past into the socially connected present.
As for Ahmed’s past, it was his burgeoning interest in fashion as a teenager in Coventry that started his collection of those VHS tapes of runway shows. Aside from scouring the TV for any runway coverage, he worked an after-school job so he could afford to buy Vogue (at least he came by his honestly—I stole mine out of the school library) and reached out to designers directly (their addresses were listed at the back of Vogue) to send off his fashion sketches. This was all around the same time he lied about his age to get into a local technical college to study fashion—he was 15; you needed to be 18—facilitated partly by his brother, who would write a sick note to get the young Ahmed out of high school almost every Friday so he could take college courses instead.
“I wrote to Ozbek, Versace, Chanel—everyone,” he recalls, “and told them, ‘I want to be a designer—can you give me some advice?’ And they would send lovely letters back, saying, ‘We love your drawing, and here’s a show tape, which will help you understand the fashion show, and designs, and collections.’” Sometimes he’d ring them up, too—as when the teenage Ilius rang the John Galliano studio and spoke to Galliano’s stylist partner-in-crime Amanda Harlech, who told him that John was, sadly, too busy to come to the phone, and that they had no more tapes to send anyway. He had more luck with Versace, when, he says, “In 1991 [they] offered me an internship after I sent him my design sketches but as I was only 15 years old I was too young to take the opportunity!”
Before long, Ahmed was studying at Central Saint Martins—Galliano’s alma mater—and seeing shows in London and Paris (a McQueen-era Givenchy runway sticks in his memory). He even launched his own small label before another life called, which saw him return to Coventry and a rewarding career in social services. His collection of VHS tapes, meanwhile, had been gathering dust until he eventually saw a way to bring them back to life—and in one of those full-circle moments, Unforgettable Runway has connected him back with the very labels he was asking for tapes from, collaborating on archival runway social media projects with the likes of Valentino, Karl Lagerfeld, and Dolce Gabbana, as well as digitizing archives for Philip Treacy and Stephen Jones.
Ahmed doesn’t see the era he focuses on changing. He has a deep love of the 1990s—or most of it, at least, with a gradual lessening of interest as the decade wears on—but finds the 2000s less compelling. “It’s not so much that I lost interest,” he says, “but there was such a change in fashion from around 2000 on, and it didn’t feel as relatable to me—it didn’t have as much impact on me as the ’90s. I just remember those years as being very raw, full of ideas and creativity. Then [fashion] became, in the late ’90s, very pared down and more and more minimal, and everything became a bit commercialized.”
Despite the voraciousness with which he collected, there are still some shows he’d love to find. He doesn’t need that prized video of John Galliano’s Spring 1993 collection anymore—Ahmed got it this past February from Galliano’s partner—but he’s still searching for Claude Montana’s spring 1991 and fall 1991 shows. He had them once, but they got left behind when he was moving out of his place in London. Should anyone have them to share, let him know. He still thinks about them. They remain unforgettable.
Learn more about Vogue’s Forces of Fashion event, which is back for an eighth edition on October 16—with a special focus on the power, the drama, and the spectacle of the runway show.
