In 1992, before he became one of New York fashion’s brightest stars, or ascended to the creative helm of the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs was a 29-year-old designer fumbling his creative leadership of the American sportswear label Perry Ellis. At the time he seemed unable to find a clear vision for the brand, or for himself. That would change with one runway show.
His “grunge” collection—referencing the music scene that had sprung up in the US Pacific Northwest—for the 1993 spring season was the designer’s effort to assert his own voice. Critics hated it. The plaid shirts, striped knits, and floral maxi dresses, accessorized with beanies and maybe a pair of Doc Martens or Converse Chuck Taylors, looked pillaged from a vintage store. Perry Ellis let Jacobs go soon after, turning toward its licensing business and away from doing women’s collections. But the show made Jacobs’ name, setting him up as a bold young designer capable of channeling culture into clothing. It sprung his career to a new level.
This past November, Jacobs reissued the famous collection under his own label, to much celebration by fashion fans and press, but his alleged use of one particular bit of grunge iconography has landed him at the receiving end of a lawsuit by the most iconic grunge band of all: Nirvana itself.
On Dec. 28, Nirvana filed a complaint in a California court accusing the Marc Jacobs brand of copyright infringement. The suit concerns a graphic in the reissued grunge collection with a strong resemblance to Nirvana’s “Smiley Face” logo, drawn by its late frontman, Kurt Cobain, some time around 1991 and trademarked afterward by Nirvana. It’s a slightly misshapen circle with X’s for eyes and a wobbly smile with a protruding tongue. Jacobs created a similar graphic, only the eyes are an M and a J, and instead of “Nirvana” it says “Heaven,” in the same serif font.
Nirvana has been licensing the smiley face since 1992 for use on all sorts of merchandise, where it has often appeared in yellow on a black background. Jacobs apparently didn’t get any licensing rights before creating his own graphic.
Nevermind that he was a proponent of grunge fashion: Now that Jacobs is a globally visible designer, Nirvana is evidently not happy to see the image on clothes and being used to promote the brand. The suit alleges that Jacobs is harnessing the smiley face’s association with Nirvana to make his collection seem “more authentic.” It adds that his uses of the smiley face “have caused Nirvana to suffer irreparable injuries, and threaten to dilute the value of Nirvana’s licenses with its licensees for clothing products confusingly similar to those infringing products offered by Defendants.” TMZ was the first to report the lawsuit.
It would be hard for Jacobs to argue that the image is not a reference to Nirvana. “This exclusive piece from the 1993 Grunge collection was created by Marc Jacobs during his time at Perry Ellis. This bootleg smiley tee sure smells like teen spirit,” reads the product copy for a smiley face t-shirt on the Marc Jacobs website, referring to the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Jacobs has thus far not publicly commented on the lawsuit. We have reached out to the company for comment and will update this post with any reply.
One of the charges leveled at Jacobs’ original collection was that it appropriated grunge, planting high prices on thrift-shop inspirations. Rebecca Searleman, who had the job of selling the Perry Ellis collection at Barneys in 1993, told Allure a couple years ago that shoppers at the time were wary of it, “either because they were too distinguished to wear anything associated with grunge, or if they were hip clients, they were turned off by Marc Jacobs’s co-opting grunge.”
Cobain and Courtney Love, lead singer of the band Hole and Cobain’s wife, weren’t impressed either. “Marc sent me and Kurt his Perry Ellis grunge collection,” she told WWD in 2010 (paywall). “Do you know what we did with it? We burned it. We were punkers—we didn’t like that kind of thing.”
In the years since, however, minds have changed on the collection. Fashion critic Cathy Horyn, who savaged the grunge show on its debut, reconsidered it in 2015, asking “why did so many critics allow no room on the American runways for a look that was legitimately an expression of impertinent new values—about alternative beauty, unaffected glamour, anti-luxury?” Now, she noted, it’s an important reference point. She spoke to Marc Jacobs too. Grunge, he told her, remained his favorite collection.