One can easily date the exact moment when Grunge overtook high fashion: November 3, 1992. On that day, designer Marc Jacobs unveiled his Spring 1993 collection for the Perry Ellis line. Jacobs’s first model, Christy Turlington, came on the New York catwalk to a barrage of flashbulbs and gaped mouths. She was wearing a black knit skullcap, a sleeveless flannel shirt, a fuzzy sweater similar to what Kurt wore on the cover of Sassy, combat boots, and a trench coat. It was, as one headline proclaimed, “The Day That Grunge Became Glam.” Later during that same week, Anna Sui debuted her take on Grunge, which included more hippie-ish elements, while hot young designer Christian Frances Roth showed Grunge outfits using leggings and shirts tied around waists, for a more subdued influence.
But it was Jacobs’s designs, and his $300 flannel shirt, that got the attention of the mainstream press. Jacobs’s “Grunge collection” was discussed on network news broadcasts, in newspaper stories, and in the opening monologue of late-night talk shows. The very idea that “Grunge” could be a term even used in fashion was enough to draw a laugh from many.
Some in the fashion press lauded Jacobs’s creativity, but others were apoplectic. James Truman, editor of Details, a magazine that would feature Nirvana on the cover in November 1993, was one of the most quoted. “[Grunge is] unfashion,” Truman said. “Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.” Fashion writer Suzy Menkes handed out GRUNGE IS GHASTLY buttons. Fashion critic Bernadine Morris said the Jacobs collection was “mixing everything up . . . A typical outfit looks as if it were put together with the eyes closed in a very dark room.” Vogue’s spread on Grunge fashion spurred one reader to write to the editor: “Your rendition of Grunge fashion was completely off. If the whole idea is to dress down, why picture models in $400 dresses? No one who can honestly relate to music labeled Grunge is going to pay $1,400 for a cashmere sweater (especially when they can buy a perfectly comfortable flannel shirt for fifty cents at the local thrift store).”
The controversy grew further when Marc Jacobs admitted he’d never even been to Seattle. Jacobs might have been his own worst enemy with the fashion establishment when he stated in the press that his Grunge collection was “a little fucked up,” and admitted he found “a two-dollar flannel shirt on St. Mark’s Place” and had sent it to Italy to be copied in $300-a-yard plaid silk. All of Jacobs’s models wore knit beanies, a look that was closer to a yarmulke than the inexpensive knit watch cap favored in the Northwest.
Jacobs had taken over design duties at Perry Ellis International after Ellis’s death, but the Grunge collection would prove to be his undoing at the prestigious fashion company; he was fired when his designs failed to sell. “Though [Jacobs] had delivered a much-discussed and much-photographed Grunge-inspired collection for spring, the board of Perry Ellis International did not foresee making money on his women’s wear,” The New York Times reported.
Fans of Grunge music passed on the designs because they thought them overpriced. “Designers co-opted Kurt Cobain’s protest and commodified it,” wrote Nika Mavrody for The Fashion Spot, “marketing a high-fashion version of the Seattle music scene’s anti-fashion aesthetic to young people, at exorbitant prices.” Another astute observation for their failure came from Walter Thomas, creative director at J. Crew: “By the time you see [a trend] in Kmart, it can be three years [after that trend first hit the catwalk]. The difference with Grunge is that it was already for sale at Kmart, not to mention the Salvation Army.” The Grunge look had started in Kmart, or thrift stores, but it didn’t become trendy until it was worn by a rock icon.
In time, fashion writers began to shift their opinion on Jacobs’s designs. Eventually, some fashion blogs hailed his Grunge collection as “ahead of its time” and “genius.” Furthermore, some of the creations of other designers during that 1993 season that incorporated Grunge elements, like Anna Sui’s, did sell, perhaps because they were influenced by the Grunge look, albeit at higher quality and prices, but weren’t a direct copy. When a garment had just a touch of Grunge, like a tattered fringe, it found more acceptance than an entire outfit.
Grunge style, surprisingly, has stuck around. One fashion website recently called Kurt “an avid texture mixer” for contrasting sweaters with ripped jeans. What Marc Jacobs had described as his certain “fucked up”-ness became a style flourish that was hugely influential. The “vintage” look came to every department of the clothing store. As the Guest of a Guest fashion website recently opined, “Kurt Cobain took the art of worn-in denim to new extremes . . . Because of this, distressed denim is still on the shelves and racks of stores today.” Imagine Urban Outfitters or American Apparel without Grunge-influenced styles.
Furthermore, the word “Grunge” has had a lifetime in fashion, and a cachet it has not enjoyed in popular music. In music, Grunge represents a certain time and place. In fashion, it means a style that is current and still hip. If you searched “Grunge” on Nordstrom’s website in late 2013, 141 clothing choices appeared, everything from jackets to sneakers. Even on eBay, a pull-down menu lists “Grunge” as a separate category of clothing. “Grunge” is not listed as a category within music on eBay.
Grunge’s biggest fashion impact seems to have been in footwear. In 2013, Amazon listed fifty-three different “Grunge” shoes on their fashion site. Army boots and Doc Martens are ubiquitous. Both Tom’s Shoes and Nike issued designs with Sub Pop’s logo on them in 2013. Sub Pop Nikes would have been unheard of in 1988, but as the lines between music and fashion blur, Grunge continues as an influence. “Fashion houses used to be run by ‘uncool’ people, who were very serious about things and didn’t understand the role of culture,” observed Andrea Linnet. “Now it’s a given that what a band wears is going to affect fashion.”
High fashion has also continued to market clothes with Grunge influences, at sometimes exorbitant prices. Fashion writers described recent collections by Phillip Lim, Dries Van Noten, Oliver Wang, Peter Som, and even Calvin Klein all as “Grunge.” Kurt’s name often appears in the press on these new lines of clothes. One five-hundred-word 2003 piece on that season’s fashion standouts in The New York Times mentioned Kurt five times. Headlined SMELLS LIKE GRUNGE AGAIN, Ruth La Ferla’s article opined, “Grunge: that much maligned Seattle-born style, popularized by rock legends like Nirvana, has reared its head once more in the shape of lumberjack shirts, jaunty kilts, beat-up sweat shirts, bleached-out jeans, and all many of leggings in worker-bee stripes . . . Stores like Hot Topic, H&M, and American Eagle chase after teenagers’ dollars with work shirts and jeans, meant to be piled on chaotically in the manner of Kurt Cobain.”
“Smells Like Grunge Again” also highlighted Jean Touitou’s A.P.C. collection, which was titled “Smells Like Seattle.” Touitou explained that his designs were in response to “all that cheap glamour” in the rest of fashion. Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, commented, “Grunge returns whenever fashion is reacting against a more preppy or establishment look. It’s very much an anti-fashion statement, one that breaks down the notions of what goes with what . . . Today [Grunge] style is romanticized. It’s more about nostalgia than politics.”
A simple Internet search would reveal numerous fashion blogs that track Grunge styles, including Fashion. Grunge. Style. That site’s editor, Lauren Brown, said that in the last five years the Grunge look has “grasped the fashion media world like wildfire.” Spurred by the financial crisis, shopping at thrift stores for vintage items has never been hipper or more accepted in mainstream fashion. Brown says this round of interest in Grunge “has no clear and defined music style that is attached to the resurgence of the subculture.” In a strange about-face, Grunge fashion is now influenced by fashion trendsetters, and not necessarily by musical ones.
Even a model or two has been known to cite Kurt as an influence. The model Agyness Deyn was such a fan of Kurt that when she began designing dresses, one of her first crea
tions was based on a dress Kurt wore onstage. Model Alexa Chung told The New York Times that Kurt was one of her “beauty icons.” Stylists, she complained, try to make her “hair shiny, and I don’t want it. I want to look like Kurt Cobain.”
Kurt’s influence has increased as younger designers, who grew up worshipping his music, move into power positions and dictate fashion trends. Lauren Brown told me some young designers “even cite certain outfits from live performances and press shoots as inspiration for their collections.” The T-shirt company Wornfree makes vintage reproductions of the Sounds shirt that Kurt wore in many photo sessions. The forty-five-dollar T-shirt comes with a picture showing Kurt wearing the same design.
Grunge’s biggest year on the runway may have been in 2012–2013, when several highly regarded lines also jumped on the bandwagon. Givenchy’s Fall 2013 collection included its “Grunge” “Slim Fit Contrast Geometric Front and Yoke Plaid Shirt.” It was, for $545, essentially a fancy flannel shirt. Design firm Opening Ceremony launched several high-end shoes in 2013 with Grunge in their title, including the $300 “Grunge Sneaker.” Hedi Slimane’s Fall 2012 collection for Saint Laurent (formerly Yves Saint Laurent) was described as “Grunge” by more fashion writers than any line since Marc Jacobs’s 1993 collection.
One of Slimane’s designs was a $6,000 houndstooth trench coat. Another outfit was clearly modeled after one of Courtney Love’s baby doll dresses that Kurt wore over his own clothes at a concert. Slimane consciously chose Courtney, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Marilyn Manson to wear his designs in the initial wave of print ads.
“Hedi nailed it,” Courtney Love told me in 2013. “He totally knows Grunge, and he’s mixed it into fashion. He’s the one guy who got it right. It might be a six-thousand-dollar trench coat, but it is so beautifully made, with such fine fabric, you notice the quality.” Still, Love did find it somewhat absurd that fashion had gone full circle, and that what she and others bought at thrift stores was now reinterpreted for runways at high prices. She told New York magazine, “I just find it hilarious that in three months’ time, or however long it takes, women are gonna pay six thousand dollars for a fucking trench coat that cost us $4.99 back in the day. [But Hedi Slimane] got that look absolutely right.”
Even Marc Jacobs recovered from his initial 1993 Grunge collection bomb. He took some of the same ideas explored in his Grunge line and opened his own storefront design studio. In that context—high-end, limited production, exclusive contact with a designer, almost as if you were buying fashion from an art gallery—Jacobs did very well. He joined Louis Vuitton in 1997, and in 2010 Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. In 2013, he became Diet Coke’s creative director.
If Marc Jacobs’s $300 flannel shirt failed to ignite sales in 1993, that isn’t to say that Grunge didn’t fuel apparel sales when Kurt was alive. Low-priced flannel shirts saw a boom, moving from the confines of army-navy surplus and outdoor hunting emporiums into trendy youth-oriented boutiques in the mall. Flannel shirts had always been available at Walmart and Kmart, but they now were on those store’s endcaps. Flannel also began to show up at trendy retailers like the Gap and J. Crew.
Many styles of jeans began to exhibit the “distressed look” as a premium finish, not a sign of age or wear. People paid extra to get jeans that looked like what Kurt had bought in a thrift store.
Not long after the Grunge look, another bizarre fashion trend that earned the title “heroin chic” came into fashion advertising. Epitomized by model Kate Moss and an ad campaign launched by Calvin Klein in 1997, a series of advertisements made use of underweight models who appeared drug-addicted, with sunken cheeks and pale skin. In other words, the female Kurt Cobain, circa 1992. The look was controversial, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t influential, and it played into the trend of anorexic models.
Kurt had passed away by the time of heroin chic, but his death, and his public struggles with addiction, most certainly played a role in the outcry that followed, if not in the trend of heroin chic itself. Having seen a superstar of his magnitude struggle with drugs, the response to Klein’s heroin-chic ads was outrage. Thirteen of fashion’s biggest names formed Designers Against Addiction and condemned models being portrayed as drug addicts. President Bill Clinton chimed in: “The glorification of heroin is not creative . . . And this is not about art; it’s about life and death.” Klein discontinued the ad campaign, though the problem of underweight models continues. Designer Karl Lagerfeld said in 2009 that people protesting anorexic models had weight problems themselves. “These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly,” he said.
Kurt Cobain would have taken a different view from Lagerfeld’s, or Calvin Klein’s. His own thinness made him appear sexy in a society where skinniness was valued, but it was one of the greatest sources of shame for him. Because of his natural thinness, Kurt was accused of being a junkie for years before he became one. Kurt had Calvin Klein’s heroin-chic look down, and it was part of what made him a fashion icon, but there was almost nothing about his life he felt more embarrassed about.
How many clothes Kurt helped sell in the nineties can’t be measured, but it is easy to trace Kurt’s impact on the success of Converse shoes. The company had been in and out of bankruptcy, but in the nineties its sales soared. In 2003, Nike bought Converse for $305 million.
Kurt was not the only rock star associated with Converse, but he nearly lived in the brand. Look at any picture of Kurt, and he is almost certainly wearing Converse. Not since basketball player Chuck Taylor had supplied his name to All Stars in the 1920s had the brand had such an effective celebrity spokesperson, and in Kurt’s case one who worked for free.
That brand connection was forever linked in the most awful way, but one that nonetheless proved enduring: Kurt died wearing Converse One Stars. A Seattle Times photographer captured a shot of Kurt lying dead in his greenhouse, and it was published on the front page of the Times and went out on wire services around the world (other, more grisly shots have since surfaced on the Internet). In the photograph, Kurt’s lifeless corpse rests on the floor, still wearing the Converse One Stars. He had tied the laces well, itself a troubling concept when one tries to imagine a suicidal person in their last moments on earth. It was not the kind of association any company would ever seek, but the connection between Converse and Kurt was forever cemented with that death-scene image. Most kids didn’t buy Converse just because Kurt wore them on Saturday Night Live, or in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, or died in them, but all of those moments must have played a role in his association with the brand.
I was given an opportunity to examine all of Kurt’s possessions after his death—the things he owned, or at least all that remained of them. He had jeans, T-shirts, a few overcoats, and a few pairs of Converse. Kurt had written ENDORSEMENT on the toe of one pair. It was typical Kurt Cobain self-referential sarcastic humor, but in writing that one word, Kurt was saying he knew his footwear choice would matter to millions. And it did.
In going through thousands of photos of Kurt, I never came across a single picture that showed him wearing this particular pair of shoes, but his graffiti was small enough that it would have been hidden from almost any angle except directly above. These were relatively new Converses, by Kurt’s standards, so they were probably purchased in the last few months of his life. They had maybe three months’ worth of wear, and the ENDORSEMENT mark had started to come off a bit. Kurt did not treat these sneakers like the museum piece they one day will most likely be (they are currently kept in a secure climate-controlled vault). As with every piece of clothes or footwear he owned, he beat the crap out of them.
Kurt’s writing on the end of his shoe would play a small role in yet another controversy involving him. In 2006, the music publishing and marketing firm Primary Wave acquired 25 percent of the Kurt Cobain music catalog from Courtney Love. Love sold this share for several reasons,
one being that she needed the money to pay off her debts—but also, at least she argued to me, because she felt that as the years went by, and Nirvana’s music was rarely used in movies or television shows, it became less vital, important, and maybe even less valuable. That same year, Love and the remaining members of Nirvana licensed “All Apologies” to the HBO television show Six Feet Under. “Something in the Way” also appeared in the movie Jarhead. Both uses were written about in the press and drew largely positive notices, though some fans felt they were exploitation.
Primary Wave manages and markets the music-publishing interests of many superstars and estates, including Bo Diddley, Chicago, Def Leppard, Hall and Oates, Daniel Johnston, Gregg Allman, John Lennon, Steve Earle, and Steven Tyler. Still, buying the Cobain music-publishing rights was Primary Wave’s biggest and most public acquisition. The purchase price was large enough that Kurt rose to the number one spot on Forbes’s list of lucrative dead celebrities, above Elvis Presley and John Lennon.
Love’s then manager Peter Asher told Forbes, “We believe if we say yes to the right things, we can do both—make money, and do the right thing for the catalog.” Asher said the public’s attitudes toward licensing had shifted, as bands like U2 and the Rolling Stones regularly sold songs to commercials. “Now it’s, ‘Oh cool, they’re using my favorite band,’” Asher said. Primary Wave CEO Lawrence Mestel, former head of Virgin Records, told Forbes he would only license Kurt’s image to the appropriate sources. “You will never see Kurt Cobain’s music in a fast-food hamburger advertisement,” Mestel said. One of the first, and so far one of the only, places Primary Wave has licensed Kurt’s name has been the most obvious: Converse sneakers.
In early 2008, Converse announced it was issuing authorized “Kurt Cobain edition” shoes. The line was a limited run in the Converse Century campaign. There were two styles in the Kurt Cobain line: one featured “vintage-ized” versions of the Chuck Taylor All Star, One Star, and Jack Purcell models, while the other was a line of All Stars with Kurt’s writings and sketches on them. The insoles featured the phrase “punk rock means freedom” in Kurt’s handwriting. The shoes were priced from $50 to $65 a pair. Converse also announced they were making shoes with designs by the Grateful Dead and the Doors.
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