By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: May 1, 2013
The year was 1992; the scene, a fitting at Calvin Klein, where Nadja Auermann, the 6-foot fashion Valkyrie, was trying on the nude-tone slip dress she was to model on Mr. Klein’s runway. “She totally filled it out in this voluptuous way,” recalled Nian Fish, whose job as creative director of the KCD public relations agency was to oversee the proceedings.
Calvin Klein
Kate Moss in the tone-setting look for the Calvin Klein collection Spring 1993 runway show.
An instant later, a scrap of a girl emerged from behind the racks to shimmy into the very same dress. “It was falling away from her body,” Ms. Fish said. “We put sandals on her, and the whole silhouette changed.”
The girl was Kate Moss, and her fragile, faintly dissolute air heralded the sea change that would do away with the excesses of the ’80s in favor of a stripped-down and louche approach to dress that would define the new decade. By the next year, Ms. Moss’s boyish, undone, insistently “real” look had been appropriated by a generation of self-professed rebels.
That year was a pivotal one in the style world and the arts. “It was the year reality became hip,” said Jenny Moore, associate curator of “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” a checkered survey of the subversive art of the day on view through May 26 at the New Museum on the Bowery. “We were very much at a turning point, searching for something raw and authentic, and at the same time stylizing that ‘authenticity,’ fictionalizing it and then feeding it back into the culture.
“The underground was going mainstream, and we were packaging it.”
Subversion in myriad forms was being commodified on the catwalks via the skinny tailoring of Helmut Lang, the ripped-up-and-reassembled “deconstruction” of Belgian designers like Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten, and the bare-bones minimalism of Jil Sander and Mr. Klein. On the streets, the look of grunge, with its threadbare flannels, rock-chick leather jackets, flowered dolly frocks and drainpipe jeans, was having a moment.
It is a moment the style tribes have revisited repeatedly, yet it strangely persists. Grunge and its raffish offshoots, once dour expressions of a wholesale rejection of fashion, are back for an encore, reborn, paradoxically, as fashion’s last word.
Variations have sprung up over the years on the runways of designers like Marc Jacobs, who more than once reprised elements of his notorious Perry Ellis grunge collection of 1994, and Alexander Wang, whose shows are often interspliced with ’90s references: slouchy T-shirts, slashed leathers, gladiator boots.
But in recent months, the era of Nirvana, Starbucks and heroin chic has been exploited with a rarefied twist. Mr. Van Noten revived the mood, translating the thrift-shop flannels of Seattle grunge into an upmarket pastiche of gilt-edged chiffon layers, and New Yorkers like Phillip Lim and Peter Som paraded refined riffs on grunge that would not look amiss on Park Avenue.
The austere shapes of the early ’90s were reinterpreted, as well, in the fall collection of Calvin Klein, where the global creative director Kevin Carrigan introduced a line built on long-stemmed black jeans, elongated jackets, leather shirts and dun-colored sheaths that might have been worn by Carolyn Bessette before she became a Kennedy bride. The looks, Mr. Carrigan said, “represent a return to a more natural aesthetic that echoes the ’90s transition from maximalism to minimalism.”
Grunge itself, which one might have expected to go the way of the torpedo bra, only gained traction this year when Hedi Slimane offered a homage in his fall Saint Laurent collection, conjuring the spirits of California “alternative girls” and down-and-dirty pop idols like Courtney Love.
If the look endures, there is a reason. To many, the early ’90s encapsulate a golden age of untrammeled creativity before designers became megabrands. It was a time when artists of every stripe were united by a sense of shared community.
“There really was an alternative movement,” said Ms. Moore of the New Museum. “It was something we could all get on board with: the music that came out of Seattle and the community around it.
“Now everything is so fractured. There is no center anymore.”
Style-world insiders are no less wistful recalling those days. “Fashion was its own club; it was personal,” said Ms. Fish, an independent producer of fashion shows. “Behind the scenes, people were talking to each other.” And icons of the day, Kristen McMenamy, Amber Valletta and Ms. Moss, “were not getting their lips done by François Nars while checking their iPhones.”
A nostalgia for that sense of intimacy and belonging is pervasive on the Internet. “Teenagers today don’t know what it’s like to listen to new bands on the radio, then go to basement shows with friends to check them out,” said Lauren Brown, whose blog fashiongrunge.com celebrates a long-gone lifestyle. At 30, Ms. Brown often finds herself waxing sentimental.
“We were part of a scene,” she said. “Today, when everybody has their own niche band they’re listening to, it’s hard to determine what a scene is.”
A similar nostalgia has overtaken downtown streets, where the thrift-shop plaids and slip dresses, distressed leather, Army fatigues and chunky lug-soled shoes that invoke the early ’90s now form the bedrock of alternative style.
“Doc Martens — they bring a ’90s feel to any outfit,” said Chloe Chiappetti, a stylist who was making her way along Mott Street the other day wearing a mouse-colored jumpsuit, knit cap and, of course, those thick-soled lace-ups. Her turnout was a homage, she said, to her early adolescence, a time she spent in her room listening to Ms. Love’s band Hole.
Exiting Cafe Habana in NoLIta, Tracey Langfitt, an artist, wore a plaid shirt loosely knotted over a paint-spattered work shirt and a faded calf-length denim skirt. “I can’t shake California grunge from my system,” she said.
Her outfit was the expression of “everything I loved when I was growing up,” she said. “Kurt Cobain, obviously, and the older girls I looked up to in high school.”
She and her peers might have doted as well on “Kids,” the 1995 pseudo-documentary written by Larry Clark, Jim Lewis and Harmony Korine, detailing a day in the life of a group of wayward teenagers. That movie made a cult star of the blank-faced Chloë Sevigny.
The fashionably inclined might have turned to The Face, the influential British rock and style magazine, or to the sometimes scandalizing art of Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith and Charles Ray, who are among those showcased at the New Museum.
Fashion reflected that gritty mood, said Mr. Lim, who came of age in the ’90s. “It was not so ready-made,” he said. “Everything was more impulsive, less stylized,” emblematic, in his rose-tinted view, of “youth, music and fun times.”
Sure, it was a decadent time, one that fashion today has romanticized. “Sex and drugs were flying in the night life, especially during Fashion Weeks,” Ms. Fish said. “Still, there was an innocence. People were able to create art and newness, and there weren’t so many megabosses breathing down their necks, demanding, ‘Make that perfume, give us those sunglasses, give us that bag!’ ”
While pockets of echt-creativity remain on the runways, she noted, they have become increasingly rare.
“Designers, stylists, models: we’re all such professionals,” she observed wryly. “And fashion — it’s a business now.”
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