The Outfits Garment by Garment

Six outfits get held up as this style. Three are documented well enough to list garment by garment. The other three are readings of those, and they diverge at the same place every time, in the layers on the upper body.

Sony Studios, New York, 18 November 1993. Five garments, and the oral history of that night lists them in order: a fuzzy cardigan, a ratty button-down, a Frightwig T-shirt, jeans, Converse.

Three of those five are the stack. The band tee at the skin, from a San Francisco punk group most of the audience had never heard of. A worn button-down over it, filling the position a flannel usually takes. Whether that shirt was flannel or plain cotton is something none of the accounts say, and the video is not clear enough to settle it. The cardigan over that, open. Jeans and shoes sit outside the layer count.

The cardigan is the piece with a paper trail, and the trail says second-hand, roughly thirty years old on the night, worn hard enough to have a burn hole in it.

GMT Studios, Culver City, 17 August 1991. The "Smells Like Teen Spirit" shoot, and the accounts of what he had on do not agree. KCRW says a striped tee over a grey flannel. A menswear survey says a grey and green striped short-sleeve and dark jeans. Trade coverage of his wardrobe says two second-hand T-shirts, one over the other. The Live Nirvana archive lists the garment from that shoot as a dark green collared shirt. That settles one thing. The middle layer had a collar on it.

On the floor of that gymnasium, Converse high tops over white gym socks. The band recruited its extras with a flyer that read: no clothing with name brands or logos please.

MTV Video Music Awards, 2 September 1993. A black and white fine-stripe long-sleeve shirt, washed blue jeans, a gold wallet chain clipped to a belt loop. Every other performer that night dressed for the occasion. By this date the wardrobe had become a reference the industry was scrambling to source. The person it was being sourced from turned up in it unchanged.

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 in chiffon. Dr Martens with the laces left undone. The shirt and the thermal sit where they should. The dress belongs to no position in the stack at all. Every fibre in it was specified, including the laces left hanging.

Tumblr, around 2013. Boots, a band tee, a tennis skirt, torn tights, a choker, a flower crown. The band tee is the single item that also turns up at Sony Studios. Those boots are eight-eyelet. The Sony Studios photograph has canvas low-tops in it. Even the footwear diverges. The remaining four belong to a wardrobe assembled twenty years later.

Now. An oversized knit, skinny jeans, new Nikes. Trade coverage puts this combination on A$AP Rocky, Wiz Khalifa and Young Thug.

The readings each have a record of how they were assembled: a design house's specification, a Tumblr aesthetic with a name, a styling convention reported in trade coverage. No such record exists for any of the first three, and that absence is the whole of what separates them.

The Word Started as a Description of Guitar Noise

Mark Arm coined it in 1981 about a guitar sound, and has spent four decades insisting that is all he meant. Sub Pop put it on a sleeve in 1987. Every use in that stretch describes noise.

The word carries no instruction about cloth, cut or layering at any point before November 1992, when a New York newspaper attaches it to a garment. Whatever defines the style came from outside the word.

Who These Clothes Were Made For

Loggers, miners, postmen and soldiers wore these garments first. Pendleton cut its Umatilla shirting for outdoor work in 1924, Levi's built the jean for miners, Dr Martens built the 1460 for postmen and factory hands, and Pearl Jam's stage clothes came out of army surplus.

Four supply chains, none of them fashion. On a rail they share one property. Weight. A garment cut for a shift outdoors in 1972 was still holding its shape on a thrift-store rail in 1990, at two dollars, while the clothes sold alongside it for evenings out had come apart years earlier.

Who Decided What Counts

The clothes went out on record sleeves years before the rule got written. Sub Pop hired Charles Peterson to shoot from inside the crowd, wide angle and uncropped. Those frames caught whatever the band had on that night. Those images went onto Soundgarden and Mudhoney sleeves and into magazines worldwide.

Then the list got written, in New York, across that winter. It opened with a glossary the New York Times ran on 15 November 1992. Two of its entries named garments, under names never used in Seattle. A former Sub Pop employee had invented them on the telephone that week, and The Baffler printed the truth a few months later.

By the end of that spring three garments had survived into the definition: a plaid shirt, a torn jean, a heavy boot. The thermal, the striped long-sleeve and the cardigan all fell outside it, and have stayed outside it since.

The Layers and the Order They Go On

That arrangement was not a one-night affair. A menswear title's survey of his wardrobe finds the same arrangement holding across four years, working from a 1990 band photograph: brown corduroy zip jacket, open, over a green knit cardigan, over blue jeans, in colours and weights that matched loosely at best. The documentary record thins out fast beyond him. Charles R. Cross, who has written two books on Cobain, describes flannels, wool sweaters and thermals worn together against a wet and cold western Washington. Vedder played in cut-off fatigues over long underwear. For Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains what survives is captions: flannel, denim, boots, named but not counted. One garment-by-garment inventory exists for this scene, and it exists because the cardigan went to auction. Everything below is extrapolated from that inventory and a handful of photographs.

Take one layer out. A shirt and a jacket show one edge at the collar and nothing else. That is ordinary dressing. Add a fourth and the outline stops following the body at all. At three the photographs show a cuff at the wrist, a hem below the shirt, a collar at the neck.

The order runs one way only. The tee stays at the skin whatever the temperature, and the cardigan goes on outside the flannel.

Cloth weight settles that. A flannel is woven, around ten ounces, stiff enough to hold an open front by itself, while a wool or mohair cardigan runs heavier and has no weave holding it square, so it settles into the shape of whatever it goes over, and that is the reason it belongs on top of the shirt.

The Women's Half of the Scene

From the shoulders out, women in the scene dressed off the same rails. The divergence starts underneath, where a babydoll dress or a satin slip goes on as outerwear, and kinderwhore is the name that attached to it.

That name matters here for one reason. Kinderwhore is the only arrangement in this scene specified while it was still being worn, down to the collar shape and the lipstick colour. The men's version stayed unnamed until New York got to it in 1992. That gap is why the stack has to be read off photographs at all.

Shared rails did not mean a shared scene. Riot Grrrl started in Olympia partly as a reaction against grunge for being too male-dominated, and Catherine Strong's work argues that women's contributions were later folded into that label. The flannel and the boots crossed that line in both directions, and the babydoll dress stayed on one side of it.

Why the Count Runs High

The Pacific Northwest weather accounts for the layer count. The proportions come from somewhere else.

Charlotte Blum, who wrote a book on grunge culture, is quoted in trade coverage saying Cobain doubled up his clothes to hide how thin he was. KCRW's account adds two pairs of jeans to the same habit. The doubled t-shirts listed among the Culver City accounts above belong to it too.

Doubling a tee adds bulk across the chest and shoulder without adding length. Doubling a jean thickens the thigh. Width goes on where the body has none, and the garment count ends up past what the rain calls for.

The silhouette that came out of it runs thick through the middle and shapeless at the shoulder.

How Much Bigger Than Your Size

Slightly large is how Cobain's clothes get described in accounts of his wardrobe. That one word separates this wardrobe from the oversized silhouettes that came after it.

There is no period measurement to work from. The vintage trade starts from a garment you already own instead. Lay your best-fitting shirt flat, measure armpit to armpit, and carry that number to the rail. Anything you buy for this stack sits above it. How far above is a judgement. In the photographs the margin looks like a single size.

The tag will not help. American manufacturers abandoned the official size standards in 1983, and a bust that was a 14 in the Sears catalogue in 1937 was an 8 by 1967 and a 0 by 2011. On a rail of secondhand shirts the letter on the label records what a marketing department wanted a buyer to feel, in a year you cannot identify.

Then there is what the previous owner did to it. Cotton fibres swell in hot water and contract as they dry. Wool is worse. Each fibre carries scales that interlock under heat and agitation, and a shirt that has felted that way has changed size permanently. A garment can sometimes be coaxed back half an inch with a cold soak and blocking. Beyond that the fit you are holding is the fit you get.

Grunge sits at the low end of that gap. The extra inch or two goes into the chest and the shoulder. The length stays put.

Find the shoulder seam. In these outfits it has cleared the bone and stopped a short way past it. A dropped shoulder carries it far enough down the arm that the garment has to be cut wide through the body before the arm will lift at all. That forces it wide as well as long. Buy up two sizes and you get both at once, at which point a flannel reaching mid-thigh has become a coat.

There is a second boundary at the other end. A shirt that fits sits flat against the layer below it, and the edges disappear.

How the Flannel Is Worn

Hanging open is the position in almost every photograph. The other two, knotted at the waist and buttoned to the top, turn up rarely enough that neither reads as the default.

Two things hold across all three. Sleeves get pushed up the forearm, where a rolled cuff would keep its fold and stay put. Every hem stays outside the waistband.

How to Check the Cloth

Run a thumb across the surface. Flannel names a weave, and the nap comes from brushing that surface after weaving. That lifts the fibres and traps air between them. A flat-woven plaid cotton skips the step and comes out lighter on the same yarn.

Check the hem. T-shirts made before the mid-1990s carry a single line of stitching at the sleeve and the hem. The double row arrived with faster machines. The signal has two known failures. Some nineties shirts were double-stitched from the start, and current brands imitate the single line on purpose.

Then check the mill. A vintage dealer who has handled a lot of them reports that American flannel shirts made between the 1970s and the 1990s often ran on Cone Mills Brawny cotton, named on the tag. Reproductions of those shirts sell for around $200.

The same dealer puts the hit rate at roughly one good American sanforized flannel every four visits, with a caveat: that is if you wear a large or an extra large. Mediums are uncommon and smalls are rare. Some stores pull the flannels out and hang them at the end of a rack. That saves time and never catches all of them. The full scan of every shirt on the floor is the method that works.

The yarn in flannel is thick. It catches and pulls where a poplin shirt would not. Whatever you find, run a hand over the elbows and the seat of the collar before anything else.

Where Real Wear Shows on Denim

Real wear lands at the knee, the hem and the pocket edge, frays outward, and leaves the two legs unmatched.

Factory distressing lands in matching places left and right, comes out even at the edges, and is sanded more often than torn. Printed distressing is a step further again. The damage is an image on the surface of the cloth.

Whiskering is the one I find hardest to fake and easiest to read. Those are the pale creases fanning out from the top of the thigh. On a jean worn for four years they sit where that particular hip folded, at slightly different heights on the two legs, crossing at odd angles, more of them on whichever side took the wallet. Factory whiskering gets stamped or sanded from a template. It comes out symmetrical, evenly spaced, identical across every pair in the size run.

Hold a pair at arm's length and that symmetry registers before the colour does, before the cut does. I have never seen it listed among the standard checks. It takes about a second.

Straight cut, sitting at or near the natural waist. Measure from the crotch seam up the front to the waistband. A nineties rise sits noticeably higher than a current one. That is the fastest way to date a pair by hand.

Where the Hem Lands on Boot and on Low-Top

An eight-eyelet boot climbs past the ankle bone and a canvas low-top stops under it.

That difference in height settles where the hem lands. Over the low-top, the denim drops straight down and covers the shoe. Over the boot, the hem either breaks on the shaft or stops above it, and a thermal cuff shows in the gap. Which of the two you have on decides how the trouser finishes.

The 1460 takes eight pairs of eyelets and the 1490 takes ten. Those two extra pairs carry the collar up the calf, and the hem has to break somewhere the eight-eyelet version never puts it.

Two shoes carried this wardrobe. The boot reached Seattle having already passed through skinheads and punks. The canvas low-top cost a fraction of the boot's price. Cross has said no photograph shows Cobain in Docs. He played and died in Converse.

Grunge Plaid and Punk Tartan

Punk and grunge each wear check, and each took it from a different place.

Punk took the Royal Stewart tartan, a symbol of the British establishment. It was ripped, safety-pinned, and worn as desecration. Westwood and McLaren sold the result out of a shop on the King's Road.

Grunge took Pendleton's Umatilla, cut in 1924 for loggers and fishermen working outdoors in the Northwest. It was on the rail for a few dollars.

What the wearer did after buying divides them again. Punk cut, pinned, painted and patched. Grunge put it on.

A punk garment carries evidence of a decision: a slogan painted across the back, a seam opened and re-pinned, a patch sewn where nothing was torn. A grunge garment carries evidence of use. Use leaves its marks at the seat, the front thigh, and the pocket edge where keys ride.

Both wardrobes came out of the same shops, and only the punk one went home and altered what it bought.

Trousers split the two as cleanly. Bondage trousers carry zips, straps, chains and buckles. Tartan is among their most common patterns. The grunge trouser is a straight-leg jean already worn through by its first owner.

Grunge Black and Goth Black

Put a goth wardrobe and a grunge one side by side and black is the only overlap.

Goth builds its black deliberately, out of Victorian mourning dress, punk hardware and glam theatre. Dye takes differently on wool, on cotton and on synthetics. A black jacket over a black shirt reads as two colours in daylight.

Grunge black is faded black.

Hold two black garments up to a window. A goth notices the mismatch and replaces the offending piece. The same mismatch is the normal condition on a grunge rail, and both pieces stay in rotation.

Goth ran narrow for most of its history before moving to oversized, and that move is when the two silhouettes started getting mistaken for each other.

Soft Grunge Names a Trend and a Genre

Go back to that 2013 outfit. The tennis skirt, the flower crown, the torn tights and the choker each do work there. The crown sits on a leather jacket, the spike choker over a pastel knit, the boots under the tennis skirt, each soft piece paired off against a hard one.

Every pairing is a decision, and it fails the moment either half stops being legible.

The Seattle stack accumulates instead. Each piece sits where it landed, commenting on nothing, and from across a room the layers blur into a single mass.

On a hanger the two look like the same wardrobe, and the difference only appears once the pieces are on a body.

The fashion version began on Tumblr in the late 2000s and peaked around 2014.

How Deliberate the Look Was

Which account you take decides whether you may shop for this at all.

The slacker label belongs to this argument too. It was applied from outside, as a pejorative for a generation older people read as lazy and self-absorbed, and Cobain rejected it in specific terms. In 1992 he told Flipside that bands who had spent years in the hairspray scene and then stopped washing their hair and started wearing flannel made no sense to him. His own ambition is documented. He spent interviews arguing against exactly the reading the clothes were getting.

In 1993 Jean Paul Gaultier told Vogue that grunge was the way people dress when they have no money, and the magazine kept the line in its own encyclopedia entry. Marc Dufaud, who wrote a book on Cobain, calls him a paradox and says he paid a great deal of attention to it. Darren Julien, who sold the cardigan, says Cobain created the look and did not wear show clothes.

One says accident, one says care, one says authorship. All three have been in print for thirty years and none of them has settled it.

Take Gaultier at his word and a shirt you chose for the stack is disqualified by the choosing. Julien's version makes the choosing the craft. A flannel picked for its fade and its weight is then doing what Cobain did. Dufaud's account sits between the two.

What Sellers Do With the Word Now

Filter a resale site for nineties flannel and one of the facets on offer is a Look filter. Grunge is a value inside it, alongside Punk and Goth, and on any given day it carries the large majority of the listings.

The counts move week to week and I have not verified them against the site directly. The filter itself is the evidence. Grunge is a box a seller ticks. The property lives in the listing, applied by whoever wrote it.

One subscriber wrote to Vogue in 1993 about its grunge editorial and did the arithmetic in the letter. Nobody who could honestly relate to this music was going to pay $1,400 for a cashmere sweater when a perfectly comfortable flannel shirt cost fifty cents at the local thrift store.

Reproductions of the American mill flannels run to around $200. The originals they copy sit under $50 on the same auction site.

Put the $200 reproduction and the $50 original side by side. Same button spacing, same collar, same drape, same brushed nap. The reproduction has not been through twenty years of laundry.

How to Test a Stack You Own

Put the question to a stack you already own.

Look at what shows at the edges. In the photographs it is a cuff, a hem and a collar. Calling that a rule is my inference. It describes what those outfits did. Read it as a description.

Measure across the chest, armpit to armpit. Compare it against your own best-fitting shirt, laid flat, as above.

Then ask where each garment came from. A flannel you bought for the stack hangs exactly like one that was already on the rail. The first two moves cannot separate them. Whether this third one settles anything depends on which of the three accounts above you accept.

Putting One Together

Common Questions