On December 12, 1992, the British music weekly Melody Maker asked Kurt Cobain why he and his bandmates wore dresses in the video for “In Bloom.” At the end of a brief but brilliant interview, Cobain replied: “Cross-dressing is cool. I’m sorry I can’t come up with any better reasons for why we wore dresses for our video shoot, it’s just that I wear them all the time—round the house, wherever.”
Cobain maintained that he wore dresses for comfort (the same interview reveals his intimate problem with Levi’s) rather than to be subversive or progressive or political or whatever. Yet the “In Bloom” video’s contrast between Nirvana attired in striped blazers with mop-top haircuts, à la early Beatles, and the band’s thrashing in womens wear was surely no casual adjacency: All true punk spirits rattle the cage of categorization through provocation while appearing to be nonchalant about it.
Which is a two-paragraph preamble to the first 10 looks of this Soloist collection, all renderings of different Cobain looks—from gigs, videos, magazine shoots for Rolling Stone and Mademoiselle—hand-painted on medical gowns. These were part of a collection that Takahiro Miyashita indicated in his notes was inspired by a creative instinct to jolt forward and refrain from repetition. The results included skirts resembling pants printed with text that Google Translate suggested might be Oromo, hoodie dresses with more legible brand markings, and de-then-reconstructed tailoring structured and decorated with languidly curving zippers. Gender norms were the cage being rattled, nonchalantly, and the Soloist spirit burned bright and clear.
