What the Outfit Was, Head to Toe

A knitted beanie comes down to the eyebrows, in a solid dark colour, over hair that is long and unstyled and either parted in the middle or left to fall where it falls.

The shirt underneath is a t-shirt, usually a band shirt, usually a size too large. Over it goes the flannel, worn open, sleeves rolled or pushed up the forearm. Every hem stays outside the waistband.

Below that, jeans. Straight or slightly loose, faded from wear, torn at the knee where the fabric gave out. A second layer often shows at the ankle: thermal long johns under the denim, the ribbed cuff visible above the boot.

Layer four is a cardigan, oversized, buttons undone, sleeves past the wrist. It goes over the flannel. Grunge silhouettes end up thick through the middle and shapeless at the shoulder.

Why the Stack Runs Four Deep

Seattle took 37.5 inches of rain a year on the climate normals that covered the decade, and the months from October to April took almost all of it. The National Weather Service puts the November normal at 6.31 inches against July's 0.6, with a December overnight normal of 37 degrees. That is half a year of damp at forty degrees.

Layering solved that, and it did something else at the same time, because four garments stacked on a body erase the shape of it, and the cut on all four runs wide through the chest, the waist and the hip, so that whatever is underneath stops being legible at about the second layer.

Charlotte Blum, who has written a book on grunge culture, says the Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain grew up poor and doubled up his clothes to hide how thin he was. Photographs from 1991 show him in two second-hand t-shirts at once, one over the other.

An oversized flannel over a band shirt over jeans went on men and women in the same sizes, off the same rail, with no alteration.

The Word Was an Insult About Guitars

In July 1981 Mark Arm, then nineteen and still writing as Mark McLaughlin, sent fake hate mail about his own band, Mr. Epp and the Calculations, to the Seattle fanzine Desperate Times. "Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!" Clark Humphrey, who edited the zine, treats that letter as the first time the word landed on a Seattle band. Arm has spent four and a half decades refusing the credit. Paul Rambali had used it in the NME in 1978 about mainstream guitar rock, and a reissue owned by Steve Turner, the guitarist Mr. Epp had recruited to make the band look serious, carried it in the liner notes about a fifties guitarist. Arm's own objection is that he wrote it as an adjective.

Sub Pop's copy for Green River's Dry As a Bone in 1987 called the record ultra-loose grunge that destroyed the morals of a generation, and Bruce Pavitt, who had co-founded the label, kept using it across 1987 and 1988.

Every one of those uses describes a guitar. In Seattle the shirts were still just shirts, bought off a thrift-store rail for warmth. Eleven years separate that letter from the first time a newspaper used the word about clothing.

The Flannel Shirt Is Older Than the Music

Pendleton Woolen Mills in Oregon put its Umatilla wool shirting on the market in 1924, made for loggers, fishermen and teamsters working outdoors in the Northwest. Pendleton still lists the cloth at 10.1 ounces, plain weave, virgin wool. The garment stayed in that market for forty years.

In the 1960s the Beach Boys wore Pendletons on record sleeves and stage, and the shirt moved into Californian surf culture. The band had been called the Pendletones before that.

By the late 1980s the same shirt hung in Seattle thrift stores for a few dollars, two generations of loggers and surfers having finished with it, which is how a garment cut in 1924 for men working outdoors in the rain arrived on a rail in the same city sixty years later at a price a musician with no income could pay.

Open, Tied, or Buttoned

Open, over a tee. The default, and the one in almost every photograph. Buttons undone all the way, shirt hanging loose, tee visible from collar to hem.

Tied at the waist. Sleeves knotted at the front, body of the shirt hanging down the back of the thighs. More common on women in the scene. The shirt stops being a layer and starts being a belt.

Buttoned, as the whole top. Buttoned and tucked is how the shirt went on a job site. That was the market Pendleton cut it for in the 1920s.

The first two positions leave the tee showing. The third covers it and turns up least in the photographs.

Where the Denim Wore Through

In the 1991 photographs the tears sit where denim fails: at the knee from kneeling, at the hem from dragging under a heel, at the pocket edge from keys. Neither leg matches the other. The thigh stays intact.

Faded at the seat, the front thigh and the knee, darker at the inseam and the waistband. A factory wash lands in the same places on both legs. Wear lands wherever the body put it.

The skinny jean arrived a decade later.

The Cardigan and the Layers Beneath

The knit is cut for a bigger body than the one inside it. The shoulder seam sits down the upper arm. The cuff covers half the hand.

How much bigger is a question I cannot answer with a number. Nobody measured these garments at the time. The surviving ones came off thrift-store rails one at a time. Each survivor is a single garment off a different rail. Even the Cobain cardigan, through an auction house twice, is catalogued with one word for size: medium. Every figure in circulation traces back to somebody eyeballing a photograph.

The cardigan is the signature piece: shawl or notch collar, five buttons, worn open, in olive, brown, mustard or grey. The Cobain cardigan that went to auction was acrylic and mohair with Lycra, a blend chosen by whoever knitted it for the 1960s market. By 1990 that blend was thirty years out of production and sat on thrift-store rails.

A striped long-sleeve tee in horizontal bands goes under it, with a thermal beneath that. Three collars and three cuffs end up visible at once, each one a different colour from the layer under it.

What Went on the Feet

Of the two shoes that carry this wardrobe, Cobain wore one.

The Dr Martens 1460 is a six-inch black leather boot with eight eyelets, a yellow welt stitch and an air-cushioned sole, built in Northamptonshire from 1960 for postmen and factory workers. The 1490 is the same boot with ten eyelets and more shaft. Skinheads took it, then punks, and by 1990 Seattle had it.

Charles R. Cross, who has written two books on Cobain, told KCRW that no photograph shows him in Docs. Cobain wore cheap Chuck Taylors, once inked the word endorsement across a toe cap as a joke, and died in a pair of Converse One Stars. Eight eyelets turn up on the poster for Singles in 1992 and on the designer Marc Jacobs's runway a few months later.

Weight is the obvious thing to compare and the published figures scatter. Published figures for a pair of 1460s run from 1.1 to 1.5 kilograms depending on who is doing the weighing, and none of the sources is one I would put in print. The ankle bone is a better line anyway. A Chuck Taylor stops under it, so a jean hem drops straight over the shoe and you lose it entirely, whereas an eight-eyelet shaft climbs two inches past the same bone and the hem has to do one of two things: break on the shaft, or stop above it and let the long john cuff show in the gap. You settle that at the shoe, before the trousers go on.

The Washington Post put a pair of Docs at $120 or more in the United States by the mid-nineties. That put the boot outside the range a thrift store carried.

The Women's Version

Flannel, boots, cardigans and band shirts were shared, so that from the shoulders out a woman in this scene and a man in it were dressed off the same rails, and the divergence starts at the layer underneath, where the dress belongs to the women's side alone: a babydoll cut in cotton or a satin slip, worn as outerwear, often over a long-sleeved tee.

Kinderwhore was the name that stuck to the sharper version of it. Babydoll dresses with Peter Pan collars, torn tights or knee socks, Mary Janes or heavy boots, hair bleached and pinned with plastic barrettes, crimson lipstick smudged at the edges.

Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland and Courtney Love of Hole shared an apartment and a wardrobe in San Francisco in 1985, and both are credited with assembling that look. Everett True of Melody Maker gave it the name.

The dresses came from Goodwill and the Salvation Army, at the same price as the flannels.

The Outfits, Item by Item

Pearl Jam at Harrods, London, 1991. Cut-off fatigue shorts held together with electrical tape, tie-dyed long underwear, rock t-shirts. SPIN carried it in the September 1991 issue. The afternoon itself falls somewhere in the first half of that year. A guard asked the band to leave. Vedder offered to go straight to the men's department and buy something else to wear. He was refused and the band was escorted out.

Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis, New York, 3 November 1992. Two-dollar second-hand flannel shirts remade in printed silk. Thermal long johns remade in cashmere. A floral dress remade in chiffon, shown with untied Dr Martens or satin Converse. Christy Turlington opened; Kate Moss and Kristen McMenamy closed in beanies. The Harrods outfit, remade in silk, cashmere and chiffon. Jacobs lost the job over it. The collection stopped at the samples. How quickly the sacking came is disputed: Dazed dates it to just after he collected the CFDA Designer of the Year award in January 1993, AnOther puts it within weeks of the show. The award and the sacking came off the same collection. He posted samples to Cobain and Love. Love, later: "We burned it. We were punkers, we didn't like that kind of thing."

Kurt Cobain at Sony Studios, New York, 18 November 1993. An olive green cardigan, Manhattan brand, size medium, acrylic and mohair with Lycra, five buttons with one missing, two outside pockets, a cigarette burn and discolouration by the left pocket and again on the right. Baggy jeans. Sources disagree on what was under the cardigan: CNN and Dazed both say a white tee, while at least one account has a button-down with a graphic tee over it. The rest of the band dressed to match the room, Grohl in a turtleneck and Novoselic in a worn t-shirt.

The costume historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell dates that cardigan to between 1960 and 1965 and found a Manhattan brand advertisement from the early sixties offering a comparable one at $15.95. Cobain was born in 1967. It has not been washed since he last wore it. In 2015 it sold at auction for $137,500, and in October 2019 for $334,000.

The same four garments carry all three sets: a shirt, a knit, a trouser and a shoe.

The Four Seattle Bands Dressed Differently

Grunge gets described as one wardrobe. On the stages that produced it there were four.

Nirvana carried the most layers and the least new cloth. Cobain worked in striped sweatshirts, cardigans over tees, shorts pulled over long johns, torn jeans and Converse, every piece off a second-hand rail and cut for a bigger frame than his. He wore Courtney Love's dresses on stage more than once.

Pearl Jam and Soundgarden dressed out of army surplus instead. Vedder played in cut-off fatigue shorts over long underwear and combat boots, a set any garrison-town shop carried in quantity. Chris Cornell went on in army boots and no shirt at all, hair to the shoulder, and the same boots and cargo shorts turn up on both men, who had played together in Temple of the Dog in 1990 and presumably shopped in the same places. Soundgarden spent 1991 and 1992 opening for Guns N' Roses on the Use Your Illusion tour. The bare chest belongs to that circuit.

Alice in Chains went to leather and black, with long hair, band shirts and less flannel than any of the others.

Price was the common factor. Every garment on those four stages was second-hand. The uniform was applied afterwards by people writing about the scene.

Before and After Nevermind

Nevermind came out in September 1991 and reached number one on the Billboard chart that January. The wardrobe changed hands in the fourteen months that followed, and the decade ends up holding two versions of it.

Before that, the clothes were what they appeared to be. Nirvana recruited extras for the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video with a flyer that read: no clothing with name brands or logos please. That is a dress code written by people with no money for a room full of people with no money.

After it, the same items started arriving new. Perry Ellis showed the silk version in November 1992 and US Vogue shot plaid six weeks later, the same garments in the same shape with a retail price on them.

Where the Muted Colours Came From

Brown, olive, mustard, rust, grey, faded black, washed indigo.

A thrift store in 1990 was selling what households had bought new fifteen to twenty years earlier, and the 1970s produced brown, olive, mustard and rust in quantity. Why that decade settled on those colours is a separate question, unanswered here. Grunge wore whatever the racks held.

The plaid carries the only bright colour, running to deep red, forest green and navy on a black or cream ground.

The Fake Glossary in the New York Times

On 15 November 1992 the New York Times printed a glossary of grunge slang, and two of the entries were garments. Wack slacks meant old ripped jeans. Plats meant platform shoes.

Both were invented on the phone that week. Megan Jasper, twenty-five, had worked at Sub Pop and was at Caroline Records when Rick Marin rang for the vocabulary. He was writing the piece for the Times. She supplied the two garment terms, escalated as far as swingin' on the flippity-flop, and waited for him to stop typing. He did not. The Baffler printed the truth a few months later, and the Times at first treated the man who reported it as the hoaxer.

The article ran under the heading of greasy hair and lumberjack shirts, twelve days after Perry Ellis. A newspaper was telling its readers what to call clothes that the people wearing them called nothing at all. Cathy Horyn, reviewing it, got to the price before anything else: rarely had slovenliness "looked so self-conscious, or commanded so high a price."

The same season US Vogue shot plaid on Naomi Campbell, Anna Sui put flannel and denim into her Spring 1993 collection, and in March 1993 Suzy Menkes handed out Grunge is Ghastly pins at Milan.

Telling Nineties Jeans from a Reissue

What the Wardrobe Cost

Everything above the ankle sat in one price bracket. A Seattle thrift store in 1990 priced it at a few dollars a piece, and Goodwill priced the dresses the same. Musicians with no money bought what was cheapest. That is the whole economic basis of the style.

The Board Shirt is still in the catalogue at $157.99 to $230. One shirt at full price now costs more than the whole 1990 outfit did.

Docs ran to $120 in the mid-nineties.

What Stayed in Production

In 1993 Cobain was photographed in a t-shirt reading "Grunge is dead." The scene thinned out after his death in April 1994. The clothes stayed in circulation and stayed in production.

Pendleton still sells the Umatilla board shirt. Dr Martens still sells the eight-eyelet 1460. Converse still sells the Chuck Taylor. Three of the garments in this wardrobe are orderable new, under the model names they carried before the decade started.

How to Dress This Way Now

Common Questions