Grunge

Spontaneous youth movement and style, which made its debut with the Autumn 1991 Collection by Perry Ellis, in the official language of fashion: flannel shirts, secondhand Levi’s, sweaters, and unkempt T-“shirts. It comprises the typical wardrobe that a bohemian affected by recession and a student away from home have donned for years, which suddenly became fashionable. The reason why lies in the commercial success of music bands, such as Nirvana, Breeders, and Smashing Pumpkins who, in the rock scene, removed the glam metal wave of the headbanger groups, such as Poison and Guns’n’Roses, exactly as the Ramones had done with all the glitter bands 15 years before. Generally speaking, the rock’n’roll attitude had been focused on the identification with the male prototype of the black rebel for decades. From the pervasive influence of blues in the 1960s to the punks who would identify themselves with the reggae of Rastatarians, Grunge does not escape the trend. The generation of teens who had grown up in the shadow of suburban malls in the outskirts of town fervently imitates the psychopathic cool of the gangsta rap. As a phenomenon, Grunge brought to light a generation of defeatists whose main desire was to survive in society’s hollow spaces. Disillusion was the new motto. A generation attracted to secondhand objects and to a matching geniality proclaimed dressing down to be a new, interesting code. From the female perspective, the style attitude of new anti-stars, such as Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, were immediately taken up by fashion designers, first of all by Anna Sui and Marc Jacob. They both translated the impulses into ready-to-wear, making large use of knitwear, patchwork, and satin mini dresses/petticoats. These designs were re-proposed in thousands of versions by many designers for the following three years.