Long before Harry Styles caused a stir by wearing a Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue in 2022, another music and style icon pushed back against binary fashion norms.
In 1993, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain graced the cover of The Face magazine wearing a blue floral dress. With smudged black eyeliner and straggly blond hair covering one eye, Cobain stared casually at the reader alongside the headline, “Nirvana: In the court of king Kurt.”
The image blended traditionally masculine and feminine elements: Cobain’s beard and chipped red nail polish, his cigarette and dainty rings. Pairing the term “king” with this androgynous image encapsulated the rebellious energy of grunge, a raw and discordant take on rock ’n’ roll propelled to commercial success by releases like Nirvana’s 1991 album “Nevermind.”
Grunge fashion championed the mundane, capturing the angst and disillusionment of Generation X and countering the elaborate hair, bright colors and spandex popular in 1980s glam metal. Instead, grunge was frugal and messy. Artists wore their hair loose and disheveled, performing in T-shirts, ripped jeans and baggy sweaters that fans could find in thrift stores. By obscuring silhouettes, the style allowed for more androgynous expression.
The subculture was anti-runway, too, a sentiment that collided with Marc Jacobs’ grunge-inspired Spring-Summer 1993 collection for Perry Ellis. The label sent samples to Cobain and partner Courtney Love. But the casual, thrifted aesthetic commodified and marketed as high fashion did not go down well with the Hole frontwoman and queen of grunge rock, reported WWD.
“Do you know what we did with it?” Love told the magazine in a 2010 interview. “We burned it. We were punkers — we didn’t like that kind of thing.”
Reimagining rock music masculinity
When the members of Nirvana wore makeup, dresses, skirts or tiaras, they resisted a culture and musical scene that enforced a strict vision of masculinity. One instance was when Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl posed for Mademoiselle Magazine in 1993, wearing bright sweaters and scarves wrapped like skirts.
“Wearing a dress shows I can be as feminine as I want. I’m a heterosexual…big deal. But if I was a homosexual, it wouldn’t matter either,” Cobain told the LA Times that year.
He was the latest in a line of rock ‘n’ roll icons who created space for others to experiment and express themselves more freely. Think of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s iconic getup — mini skirt, heels, wig and mustache — in the music video “I Want to Break Free.” David Bowie also famously blended gendered fashion elements with his flamboyant makeup and androgynous style.
Cobain often spoke out against sexism in rock music, and took a stand against discrimination, even at the risk of alienating his own fanbase. The liner notes to Nirvana’s 1992 compilation album “Incesticide” read: “If you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the f*** alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
Cobain’s “performance persona allowed him to blend femininities into rock music’s toxic staging of masculinity — for instance by wearing dresses,” Jacki Willson, associate professor in performance and gender at England’s University of Leeds, told CNN. “Our culture’s palette for masculinity and the male cis(gender) body is still very limiting and restrictive — and Cobain’s example allowed other male performers to find and stage their own authentic expression,” Willson added.
While debate around Cobain’s fashion and identity frequently crop up online, it is useful to remember that the association of fashion with binary gender was precisely the sort of construct he was resisting.
Instead, Cobain experimented with fashion, showing that clothing has no gender, that a man can wear a dress without it meaning anything about his sexuality. The blue-collared dress he wore on the cover of The Face was fairly conservative. It looked second-hand and was a little dowdy. Cobain wore it casually, no big deal. It is a statement because it is not. It says: anyone can wear anything.
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