Today's Fashion Flashback -- GRUNGE

Spring 2013 brings us designers with obvious grunge inspiration. Exactly 20 years after Marc Jacobs brought us the S/S Collection for Perry Ellis that got him canned.  Yes it was the infamous grunge Perry Ellis Collection.

Other designers that featured grunge as an inspiration during Spring/Summer 1993 were Anna Sui and Christian Francis Roth, but hardly anyone remembers that they too brought grunge to the runway that year.

Here is a look back to when fashion was first inspired by the grunge movement, which was beyond music, it was a lifestyle for those living in Seattle Washington.  It was never meant to be glamorous.  Grunge was a music scene whose revelers were mostly in poverty.  Grunge was even dubbed anti-fashion by some.  Blogger Ali Basye sums up the grunge influence with her blog: 

The Day that Grunge Became Glam

I was ecstatic to find some fashion footage of the time when grunge hit the runways.  This one features the infamous collections that first brought grunge to the runway.  (Just ignore the Oscar de la Renta collection which was not grunge-inspired.)



The following gem of a video from CNN's Style with Elsa Klensch features the Anna Sui Spring 1993 Collection.




Those collections reportedly did not sell well, hence Marc Jacobs being fired from Perry Ellis, but it left an indomitable mark on fashion, as evidenced through the years and by some of the S/S 2013 collections.  

Some of the designers bringing grunge back to high-end for Spring 2013 are:

Check out the entire Spring 2013 collections from Style.com for 3.1 Phillip Lim, Dries Van Noten, and Julien David.  (Just click on the names and you will be linked.)