I wasn’t in the audience the day in 1992 that Marc Jacobs showed his historic grunge collection, the collection that got him fired from Perry Ellis, the clothes that Bernadine Morris, writing in The New York Times, described as “mixes everything up. . . A typical outfit looks as if it were put together with the eyes closed in a very dark room.” It was several years before I began covering fashion professionally, and although I was personally obsessed with the subject, and spent a lot of time haunting vintage shops (in truth more for Louise Brooks–worthy flapper dresses than frayed flannel shirts), the revolutionary impact of the collection didn’t really hit me until I picked up a copy of the December 1992 issue of Vogue.
Click here to see Perry Ellis’s Spring 1993 grunge collection.
Here were Kristen McMenamy, Nadja Auermann, and Naomi Campbell in photos by Steven Meisel, smelling like teen spirit in silk shirts made to mimic flannel, and chiffon dresses created in an homage to polyester—garments clearly inspired by the denizens of the Seattle music scene, dissolute young guys whose clothing budgets rarely exceeded $10. Jacobs (who had in fact never been to the Pacific Northwest city) reinterpreted these rough garments in the finest fabrics, blending colors and textures with a sure hand. It was an early example of taking fashion directly from the streets—a palimpsest that would be employed by everyone from Alexander McQueen with his low-riding bumsters to today’s Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent. Jacobs’s collection sent an electric shock through the world of fashion—and through me. Critics were flabbergasted, and mostly not in a good way.
“Grunge is anathema to fashion,” Cathy Horyn thundered, “and for a major Seventh Avenue fashion house to put out that kind of statement at that kind of price point is ridiculous.” (Horyn recently retracted her opinion, acknowledging that it was shortsighted.) “Grunge: 1992–1993, R.I.P. . . . For many, Marc Jacobs’s grunge fashion collection was the final shove,” New York magazine opined. Over at Details, James Truman offered, “Grunge is about not making a statement, which is why it’s crazy for it to become a fashion statement.”
None of this mattered in the end. Jacobs lost his job but won the 1992 CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year award, and for the next two decades his radical grunge runway was emblematic of a collection-before-its-time, a raw, revolutionary response to a raw decade. But of course the joy, the pleasure of renegade dressing worked both ways—if Marc could elevate these granny dresses, these lumberjack shirts, these work boots, well, couldn’t everyone with a dollar and a dream visit the local thrift shop and put together an ensemble that looked like it stepped out of the pages of Vogue?