Kurt Cobain’s fashion choices were never about what to wear, but rather how to wear items on hand (2024)

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love may have been the first modern celebrity-fied family. With his ripped denim to her dishevelled Jean Harlow, and babe-in-arms Frances Bean, they made a star triptych on the 1993 MTV Awards red carpet.

Since then, Smells Like Teen Spirit has been covered by even the Muppets’ barbershop quartet, and Kurt ’n’ Courtney have become Halloween costumes as recognizable as Sid & Nancy or John and Yoko.

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Of his many legacies, Cobain would be most surprised at this, at his impact on fashion. That’s what Seattle journalist Charles R. Cross suggests in a chapter of Here We Are Now, his new book examining the musician’s impact on music and culture — that Cobain had planned out his musical career but not his image. He nonetheless became the reluctant poster-boy of the broader cultural phenomenon of Nirvana, and of grunge.

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Cross was the editor of Seattle alt-weekly The Rocket as Nirvana rose to fame and at the time of Kurt Cobain’s gruesome suicide by shotgun.

“If the image of Kurt in the Smells Like Teen Spiritvideo clip, with hair in his face and a striped T-shirt on, had been the indelible vision of 1991 on MTV, 1992 looked like a rocker in cutoff jean shorts, a flannel shirt, and a pair of Doc Martens,” hewrites.

“This is exactly the outfit the actor Matt Dillon wears in Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles, which came out in 1992. The film was a worldwide success, spawned a hit soundtrack album, and forever wedded Seattle to Grunge.”

There’sjust this one, small caveat: “These were not Kurt’s clothes nor his look.”

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Yet on the 20th anniversary of Cobain’s death and eve of the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that image is what endures. What should be remembered instead is the renegade attitude to fashion, not the clothes themselves.

(And anyway, as stand-ins go, if Cobain had an avatar, it would be JordanCatalano in his faded tartan shirts and sloppy striped sweater on My So-Called Life, with a little Rayanne and Angela thrown in, more on which later.)

The grunge attitude to clothing, not the layers, are especially relevant at a moment when, once again, being what fashion magazines tout as fashionable and well-dressed has more to do with the having of the right, cool thing than with the wearing of something in a cool way.

Cross likens the early 1990s phenomenon of Grunge (capitalization his) to a monster and argues that media in the U.S. needed a way to describe the fashion, music and lifestyle shifts that were embodied by youth in Seattle. “Like every youth-cultural trend from greasers to hippies to punks, there was a shred of truth.”

As a fashion trend, it arrived on the heels of Fabulous Nobodies, Lee Tulloch’s scathing satirical novel of late-’80s New York fashion label fetish and excess, but for Cobain it was by necessity, not philosophy. (If at all, that part came later.)

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As that first Twilight movie evokes so well, the Pacific Northwest is a perennially damp and bone-chilling place. Growing up in Aberdeen, Wash., Cobain was a sickly, skinny child, and even as an adult, was never not cold. He even wore long johns to the beach.

The T-shirt over long sleeves under plaid flannel shirts and fuzzy grandpa cardigan? To keep warm. The frayed and threadbare jeans over long underwear weren’t by design, just that Cobain wore through his clothes since he was destitute for most of his adult life. Not Seattle-hipster-skint-that-can-still-afford-a-daily-Starbucks destitute, but really and truly poor. And hungry. The dishevelled bed-head was because he couldn’t afford shampoo so washed his hair with cheap cake soap. He used Kool-Aid as hair dye.

Cross quotes Jean Paul Gaultier, who called grunge, “nothing more than the way we dress when we have no money.” The designer didn’t necessarily mean that as a compliment, but it’s true; Cobain also wore layers, he says, to camouflage his thinness.

Using fashion-speak, the author explains the fluke of what’s known as “the colour spectrum of Grunge fashion” (his eyes practically roll off the page), derived from available colours of $10 flannel shirts from the Olympia.

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But had Nirvana been poor and hungry musicians who happened to live in Maui or Nashville, would anyone have worn tropical board shorts and Stetsons?

There is undeniably something about the nature of the inexpensive materials — denim, flannel, canvas plimsolls — that Cobain and co. mixed and layered, chosen for no other reason that they were the ones at hand. They happen to resonate as the modest, everyday emblems of an honest day’s blue-collar work. Bruce Springsteen’s white T-shirt, bandana and 501s might know a little something about that recurring appeal: A few years ago, a reprise of workwear was dandified and billed as heritage menswear; currently, the Normcore trend appropriates everyday jeans and tees.

A 1992 feature in Vogue was one of the first magazines to use the word grunge in a fashion context, and became just another cultural moment in the history of sulky teens (1960s Youthquake, 1970s punk) to mis-remember and commodify.

That bait and switch isn’t by accident. Real, lowercase-g grunge is not good for capital-f Fashion. It’s anti-fashion (ssh, don’t tell the LVMH shareholders) and worse, a reminder of poverty (downer!), because it’s an approach to wearing the things in one’s closet. The how things are worn, not the what that they are.

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In Cross’s book, the Details editor who put Nirvana on the magazine’s cover says that, “grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.” Andrea Linett adds to this, observing that grunge wasn’t about the style of clothes, but about the styling approach. Linett, now a creative consultant, was the fashion editor of Sassy magazine for the famousKurt and Courtney cover shoot. Cobainwould not be styled in any clothes but his own.

No wonder it’s the trend Emmanuel Ungaro called a “nightmare.” But grunge isn’t ripped jeans or a plaid shirt; if it’s anything, grunge is a state of mind, an approach to getting dressed that isn’t buying the right stuff. It can’t be bought, and it won’t be sold.

Yet the echo of what most people think of as grunge reverberates every few years, with faux-thrifted shirts and loose phlegm-coloured cardigans, a pop culture pastiche now as time-worn as styling a starlet in tableau as Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe. Even in Vogue, who by the end of the ’90s called the look “one of the worst” of the decade: In 2011, the magazine styled model Carolyn Murphy and her family as the Cobains — a glamorous, literal and lazy visual shorthand of grunge, complete with torn tights, toddler and tiara.

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Putting aside that Cobain unwittingly name-checked a Mennen deodorant in Nirvana’s most famous song, the only indication of any conscious fashion, let alone branding contrivance, Cross says, is that Cobain used his growing fame to plug bands he liked by wearing their T-shirts. (The Sonic Youth T-shirt worn during his final stage performance 20 years ago sold at auction for over $15,000.)

Just as layered androgyny was already percolating in Japanese avant-garde circles, a glance at the 1993 MTV Awards image of Cobain, in his sailor-striped top and oversized retro sunglasses, recalls Breathless Jean Seberg more than it does Belmondo.

Cobain also wore a leopard-print faux fur coat, women’s blouses and pilfered Love’s kinder-whor* look in floral baby doll dresses worn over his jeans. These suggest he wanted fluid ideas about dressing and gender roles in the mainstream (he was already an outspoken feminist and gay rights advocate). Today, that mantle seems to have been picked up by Pharrell Williams. Matching his wife’s baby doll outfit, he wore strings of opera-length pearls and a Chanel jacket to the MOCA 35th anniversary party.

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The irony is that fashion can’t capitalize on grunge, though it certainly tries to capitalize on Grunge, in the way it regularly adopts a phenomenon from the street, chews it up then spits it out 10 times the price. Marc Jacobs’ spring 1993 “grunge” collection at Perry Ellis made headlines, but to the Seattle backlash it was already a parody of itself and, anyway, it got him fired. All moot since, as Cross points out, the building blocks were already for sale at K-Mart. Only the conceptual designer Martin Margiela understood this fundamental shift. His runway collection that year used existing materials: a pile of shirts bought at a surplus store.

That doesn’t stop fashion labelsfrom attempting revivals; last fall, with expensive plaid so-called grunge layers (Saint Laurent) and loose, patched jeans (Junya Watanabe) and this spring at Madewell,in pairs of medium-blue, torn and patched jeans by NSF and cult Japanese denim brand Chimala that look a lot like the ones Cobain wore on thatMTVred carpet. A Normcore steal at $500 a pair.

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