Marc Jacobs’s grunge show for Perry Ellis is the one that gets remembered—it did get him fired, after all. But Jacobs wasn’t the only designer looking to the Seattle music scene at the Spring 1993 collections. Less hyped but also important were the New York shows of Christian Francis Roth and Anna Sui.
Roth, whose muse that season was Sonic Youth front woman Kim Gordon, says he wasn’t surprised by the overlap. In a recent phone conversation he recalled running into Jacobs at a party long before the start of the season. They were both wearing flannel shirts, the symbol of the sound and an anomaly in each of their closets. Grunge was happening.
But though they shared commonalities like a mix-and-mismatch aesthetic, Dr. Martens, and stripes—lots of stripes—the shows were anything but interchangeable. In a neat postshow sound bite, Jacobs summed up his somewhat boho designs as a “hippied romantic version of punk.” A fair assessment: There were Birkenstocks among the Docs. Sui’s take on the style—what she calls “a mix of thrift shop, army surplus, and active sportswear”—was a bit more glam, partly because of her supermodel lineup and partly thanks to the sparkly makeup and colorful club shoes. Roth, in contrast, cast non-marquee models and sent them down a sod-covered runway wearing laminated backstage passes strung on pull chains borrowed from the boyfriend of one of his employees.
Looking back now, it’s hard to see what the outrage was all about. To 2015 eyes, the collections in question hardly look grungy at all. But at the time, the fact that the clothes mimicked flea market finds was seen as dangerous: Why would the customer go to an upscale boutique if she could find the “real” thing elsewhere for a whole lot less? Then there were those who felt that fashion had co-opted a subculture for its own use. But that’s not how it felt on the inside, at least not to Sui. “To me it’s a perfectly normal progression,” she says. “Isn’t that always what happens when youth culture is absorbed into mainstream fashion?”
