Kurt Cobain and the Legacy of Grunge in Fashion — vogue.com

Kurt Cobain Photo: Jesse Frohman/jessefrohman.com Edie Campbell Photographed by David Sims, Vogue, September 2013 Kristen McMenamy and Nadja Auermann Photographed by Steven Meisel, Vogue, March 2008 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. “Not only did he make it okay to be a freak, he made it desirable.”

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