Audrey Hepburn. Catherine Deneuve. Jane Birkin. The roll call of muses in fashion's pantheon is by and large an exclusive and tightly edited list. Yet there is one perennial style icon of our times who has been referenced by designers more than most in recent years—and that she happens to be a he. As Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, who died 20 years ago this past weekend, was at the epicenter of grunge, a movement that revolutionized the cultural landscape of the 1990s, and one that continues to reverberate in fashion and music today. Cobain pulled liberally from both ends of a woman’s and a man's wardrobe, and his Seattle thrift-store look ran the gamut of masculine lumberjack workwear and 40s-by-way-of-70s feminine dresses. It was completely counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of the 1980s in every way. In disheveled jeans and floral frocks, he softened the tough exterior of the archetypal rebel from the inside out, and set the ball in motion for a radical, millennial idea of androgyny.
“Kurt Cobain was the antithesis of the macho American man,” says Alex Frank, an editor at The Fader. “He was an avowed feminist and confronted gender politics in his lyrics. At a time when a body-conscious silhouette was the defining look, he made it cooler to look slouchy and loose, no matter if you were a boy or a girl. And I think he still represents a romantic ideal for a lot of women.” Before he appeared on the cover of Sassy magazine in an embrace with Courtney Love, Cobain dated Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, a band at the center of the feminist Riot Grrrl scene, and it's clear that their relationship helped set the tone for Nirvana in the early days. (As the story goes, the legendary anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” gets its name from his former girlfriend’s preferred brand of deodorant).
It was Marc Jacobs who tuned into the creative ripple effects of grunge first, and when he showed his now-infamous collection for Perry Ellis in 1992, Cobain was on his way to becoming a household name—those clothes would be shot in the pages of Vogue by Steven Meisel and Grace Coddington with an all-star cast of supermodels that included Naomi Campbell, Kristen McMenamy, and a young Nadja Auermann just a few months later. At the same time, a then-little-known Kate Moss was just beginning to make a name for herself, and the raw and spontaneous verve of the images she shot with photographer Corinne Day would establish her as fashion's poster child for the movement.
Flash forward two decades, and that free-spirited approach to dressing still has legs. **Hedi Slimane’**s fall 2013 collection for Saint Laurent was an unabashed ode to grunge, with superluxurious renditions of tattered mohair sweaters and faux-fur coats that could have fallen straight off Cobain's back. Raf Simons created an entire series of blossoming prints for his menswear collection last spring inspired by the floral dresses Cobain wore. Kurt’s plaid shirt and baggy jeans has become a models-off-duty uniform for the likes of Cara Delevingne, and even today’s musicians are borrowing from the look—Sky Ferreira and her boyfriend, Diiv frontman Zachary Cole Smith are seemingly a modern mirror to Kurt and Courtney, and Lorde is valiantly carrying the torch as the anti-pop princess in her own rabble-rousing feminist way. Even the fall collections showed subtle signs of Kurt, with buzzwords like effortlessness and ambisexuality popping up on the runways again and again. “I think an age where even Instagram photos are Photoshopped, there’s something very appealing about that sense of being comfortable in one’s skin and embracing a less-than-perfect ideal,” says music and culture writer Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. “Not only did he make it okay to be a freak, he made it desirable.”
See Hedi Slimane’s grunge-inspired fall 2013 collection for Saint Laurent.