Long before Harry Styles causes uproar by wearing a Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue in 2022, another icon of music and style already challenged binary fashion norms.
In 1993, Nirvana vocalist, the cover of The Face, wearing a blue floral dress. With blurred black eyeliner and cluttered blond hair covering one eye, Cobain looked casually to the reader next to the headline: “Nirvana: In King Kurt’s court.”
Grunge fashion celebrated everyday life, capturing the anguish and disenchantment of and contrary to the elaborate hair, vibrant colors and popular spandex in the 1980s glam metal. Instead, grunge was frugal and cluttered. The artists wore loose and messy hair, performance with t -shirts, torn jeans and loose sweats that fans found in thrift stores. In obscuring the silhouettes, the style allowed a more androgynous expression.
The subculture was also anti-Passarela, a feeling that collided with the 1993 Spring-Summer collection by Grunge-inspired by Perry Ellis. The brand sent samples to Cobain and his partner Courtney Love. However, casual and thrift stretch, marketed as haute couture, was not well received by the singer of Hole and Queen of Grunge Rock, as reported by WWD.
“Do you know what we did to it?” Love told the magazine in a 2010 interview. “We burned everything. We were punks – we didn’t like that kind of thing.”
Reinventing Masculinity in Rock
When Nirvana members wore makeup, dresses, skirts or tiaras, they resisted a culture and music scene that imposed a rigid view of masculinity. An example was when Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl posed for Mademoiselle Magazine in 1993, using colorful sweaters and scarves tied like skirts.
“Wearing a dress shows that I can be as feminine as I want. I’m heterosexual … So? But if I was homosexual, I wouldn’t matter either,” Cobain told La Times that year.
He was the latest of a rock ‘n’ roll icon lineage that created space for others to experience and express themselves more freely. Think of the iconic costume of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen – miniskirt, jumps, wig and mustache – in the music video “I Want to Break Free”. David Bowie also mixed elements of gender fashion with his extravagant makeup and androgynous style.
Cobain often manifested against sexism in rock music and was positioned against discrimination, even though the risk of removing his own fan base. The Nirvana Compilation Album Notes of 1992, “incesticide,” said, “If you somehow hate homosexuals, different color or women, do us a favor-leave us alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
“Cobain’s performic persona allowed him to mix feminities in the toxic rock masculinity staging – for example, wearing dresses,” said Jacki Willson, an associated teacher and gender professor at the University of Leeds, England, to CNN.
“The palette of our culture for masculinity and the cisgender male body is still very limited and restrictive – and Cobain’s example allowed other male artists to find and stages their own authentic expression,” Willson added.
Although the debate about Cobain’s fashion and identity often appears online, it is helpful to remember that the fashion association with the binary genre was precisely the type of construction it was resisting.
Instead, Cobain has experienced fashion, showing that clothes have no gender, that a man can wear a dress without it meant something about his sexuality. The blue collar dress he wore on The Face’s cover was quite conservative. It looked second and was a little sloppy. Cobain used him casually, without fuss. It is a statement because it is not. Says: Anyone can use anything.
