The 80s were theatre. Billionaires playing poker with television licences. Allan Bond bought Channel Nine, Kerry Packer sold it back when the bubbles went flat. Rupert Murdoch swapped passports, bought Fox for billions, and remade himself as the most formidable media mogul on earth.
New Zealand had its own tremors. Sky the brainwave of Craig Heatley, Terry Jarvis, Trevor Farmer, and Alan Gibbs launched in 1987. By 1989, TV3 went live, the country’s first private television network. Suddenly, the state monopoly was broken. Competition had arrived. As Neil Gussey reminded us in The Great 90s Rewind, media assets could be traded for a dollar, fortunes won and lost on spectrum and nerve.
Then came the 90s.
It was a decade of bravado and bravura. Brick-sized phones. No social media. Magazines that ruled like gods. I was the fourth employee at Foxtel, drunk on the idea that people would pay for what they once got free. Pay TV wasn’t just a product. It was a subscription to belonging.
Neil Roberts of Communicado summed it up in one line that still rattles around my head:
“Tape is cheap.”
Shoot more, not less. Experiment first, justify later. That line explains a decade – why magazines took risks, why TV tried formats that shouldn’t have worked, why pay TV felt inevitable. Abundance was the spirit. Tape was cheap. Attention wasn’t.
To rewind properly, you need the voices that lived it.
The Editor
Graydon Carter, who ran Vanity Fair through its 90s pomp, once said:
“You only realise it was a golden age when it’s gone.”
And he was right. Magazines weren’t content. They were scripture. If you weren’t in print, you didn’t exist. Whole aesthetics were dictated by 200 glossy pages, perfume samples pressed between covers, photographs that could anoint or erase careers overnight. Scarcity gave it weight.
In London, The Face was less a magazine than a worldview. Editor Sheryl Garratt captured it perfectly:
“We could live in a grim, cold Fortress Europe … Or we can opt for an exciting, dynamic mix of cultures and races working together.”
That was the power of editorial shaping not just style but society.
The Designer
New Zealand had its own high priestess of fashion in Adrienne Winkelmann. Her power suits and unapologetic tailoring defined ambitious women in the 90s — garments that didn’t whisper, they declared.
“Magazines could make or break you,” she recalls. “If you landed a spread, the phones rang. If you didn’t, you were invisible.”
Winkelmann wasn’t competing with Naomi, Linda, or Christy so much as giving New Zealand women the armour to hold their own beside them.
“Back then, you had one shot each season to get it right. Today you can drip-feed collections on Instagram. I’m not sure which is braver.”
Her designs carried the same energy as the decade itself sharp, defiant, brimming with intent.
The Producer
For Kelly Martin, now CEO of South Pacific Pictures, the 90s were her learning years first at TVNZ, then at TV3.
“Those were the days when we were taking big swings at everything – making the money stretch as far as it could, and letting NZ’ers know that NZ television could be fun and entertaining and that they didn’t need to have any cultural cringe about it. We commissioned and screened some groundbreaking series over those years – that still resonate today. When I think about that time I remember it as feeling exciting and fast paced.”
The sense of collective viewing was real.
“I don’t think any singular platform will be that powerful again, but I think that there is still content that reaches massive audiences – it’s just not usually at the same time. The funny thing is though that streaming platforms are starting to understand the drawing power of getting everyone somewhere at the same time and they are starting to ‘drop one episode a week’ – how very old school television of them!”
And if she could bring one thing back from the 90s?
“Bravery to take some risk, and a focus on content. Over the last 20 years we have been drowning in discussions about platforms – but those are not what make our businesses great. A platform is only ever as good as the content it has on it – I think we have lost sight of that.”
The Loop Closes
Fast-forward to 2025. Sky has just acquired Three for a dollar. The symbolism is too neat a historical loop back to when networks were swapped for pocket change. But the difference is brutal: in the 90s, scarcity gave media its power. Today, attention is infinite and loyalty is extinct.
What have they really bought? A fading brand? A newsroom running on fumes? Or the last fragile toehold of free-to-air relevance in a streaming-obsessed market?
The 90s offered bravado, glamour, and belief in the sheer force of scarcity. That bravado is gone. Maybe that’s what we miss most.
Epilogue
The 90s taught us one thing above all: roll the tape. Try the idea. Send the collection down the runway. Print the cover. Because tape was cheap.
It’s attention that was priceless. And still is.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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