“Kurt Cobain embodied cool, in a no-fucks-given way,” says the Guardian menswear editor Helen Seamons. What’s changed is who’s wearing it guitar grunge bands are dead, so rappers carry the torch, with Lil Yachty, A$AP Rocky and Travis Scott all partial to black ripped jeans and a flannel shirt. Kurt Cobain, 1990 Grunge’s first flush was a reaction to the excess of the 1980s, which grew during a recession and kicked out at the right-wing governments of George Bush Sr and, in the UK, John Major. As ’90s fashion bubbles up everywhere, grunge has become a mood board mainstay again.
But it’s also easy shorthand for any designer after an injection of authenticity. Grunge style as a trend falls in and out of fashion, but as a look, it’s never left – charity shops are still full of old jeans and cardigans artists, musicians and students are still broke. Jacobs got the sack, but also the last laugh from Alexander McQueen to Virgil Abloh, designers have ever since taken what’s new and young and youthful and luxed it up. For Vogue critic Suzy Menkes, it was “ghastly”. Which made it all the more ironic when, in 1992, designer Marc Jacobs dropped a Perry Ellis collection full of combat boots, beanies and plaid shirts that reworked grunge’s staples with four-figure price tags. Clothes were either warm, or they weren’t. ‘Thrift’ was a local verb long before the Nevermind album hit number one and Cobain’s music, and look, was that of kids who slept on sofas or under bridges and who only bought clothes when their old ones wore through. And yet the insularity of the scene in Seattle, a city awash in rain and charity shops, meant that it hit the mainstream with a defined look.
Grunge style didn’t reject fashion, it ignored it. Grunge Style and Grunge Fashion: A Brief History In hindsight, it’s a word that encapsulated not just the sound of bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden, but also their look moth-eaten, unwashed, grungy. But in his description of the scene, sent out to journalists in the late 1980s when its soon-to-be-stars were still dossing in each other’s garages, he chose ‘grunge’. In the beginning, it meant nothing. “It could have been sludge, grime, crud, any word like that,” according to Jonathan Poneman, the founder of Seattle-based record label Sub Pop, some time later.
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