An all time favourite: Grunge

As I've previously mentioned sooooo many times, the 90's is my favourite decade for fashion and where I take quite a bit of my style inspiration from. Birthed in the 90's was grunge. From plaid shirts, to ripped tights to chunky boots; grunge style gave off a massive vibe of not giving a f*ck. And, it also represented what was going on inside the wearers head too. Anger and mess.

90's fashion, leading on from the 80's, had so many different styles and subcultures. Take American High School Teen movies from the time, it was so easy to spot the different styles people wore and the different cliques you belonged to if you dressed a certain way.

The Breakfast Club for example, we have the edgy naughty kid, the quiet 'weird' girl in all black looking quite grunge, the popular jock in varsity clothing, the well behaved sensible girl who doesn't follow the crowd and the preppy nerd who just dresses quite typical.

The Breakfast Club was released in '85 so doesn't show the trends that came about in the 90's but you can see from the first 2 characters on the left that, what was then a style if you listened to rock music, impacted the grunge style to emerge in the next few years!

Whenever you think of Grunge, one name comes to your mind really, Kurt Cobain. But, the pioneers of grunge were; Nirvana, Soundgarden, Black Hole, Alice in Chains, Alanis Morissette and Pearl Jam. All these people dressed in a certain way and followed a certain style, which became Grunge fashion.

Grunge fashion headed onto runways and has continued to pop up here and there, the most renowned appearance of grunge in high end design was 1993 Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis. Who again collaborated with Perry Ellis in 2018, to recreate and redesign the 1993 collection because 90's fashion is becoming so hugely popular again.

What a beautiful collection it was, it was something different for Perry Ellis' usual ready- to- wear all- American casual crisp looks. The Marc Jacobs collaboration bought something fresh to the brand where the customers of both brands would love and buy. The grunge collection bought prints, florals, a tailored- edge to Perry Ellis. Seeing models walk down the runway in Docs and Converse was not common for the 90's, where tailored suits for the practicality of the working woman were everywhere.

“The Grunge collection epitomised the first time in my professional career I was unwavering in my determination to see my vision come to life on the runway, without creative compromise.” Marc Jacobs

Quite shockingly the fashion and music world did not support Jacobs' collection, Cathy Horn (US fashion critic) dismissed the collection and said to create a grunge collection with such a high price point is ridiculous. I do agree in a sense and I think if I was around in that era and was a fan of grunge myself, you learn to do it cheaply.

It's like nowadays, dressing well with little money, I think, is so much more impressive than dressing well with money.

What Marc Jacobs did, was, take a subculture and appropriate it for high fashion and try to make it mainstream.

Years later we can look back on the collection that he re-released and re-designed and appreciate it because the grunge scene isn't as large or as accessible now. So in my opinion turning it into fashion is honouring the subculture and trying to bring it back into fashion!

Here are a few of my favourite pieces...