How to wear grunge style

Layers of tops are essential. Good for braving the elements / outdoor gigs. Good for hiding your body and saying the body doesn’t matter too much - not compared to music, anyway.

Flannel shirts were huge for men and grunge women liked them too. Flannel was popular in Seattle as outdoor wear.

Anything plaid became accepted grunge style. Plaid flannel shirts. Long baggy plaid shorts. Tartan kilts were also good for women or men(ending above the knee but well below the crotch, ladies!)

Ripped denim. Ripped mainly because grunge kids were anti high-fashion and wore their clothes half to death. Once grunge style became popular and mainstream, people would buy their jeans and rip them in a bit before wearing them to get the grunge look. A pale, half-dead stonewashed denim was ideal for jeans.

Baggy clothes were essential for boys and girls. No skinny fit. Baggy jeans only. And baggy worked well with the layers of tops. Grunge clothes never fitted because you’d just wear something you’d found in a bin, bought very cheaply, or stolen off a friend who was skinnier/fatter than you.

Charity shop / thrift store clothes. With the recession, we’ll probably see a new mutation of grunge as people start dressing solely from charity shops, and start creating combinations of daywear that Primark never intended in all its years.

Flowery cotton dresses. But only for men. Okay, women could wear them too. But only with heavy combat boots or Doc Martens.

Cardigans and very baggy jumpers. Chunky knit cardigans with old leather buttons were everywhere. Holes weren’t just for jeans - every grunge cardigan or sweater ended up with a hole in it for you to put your thumb into so it doubled up as a pair of fingerless mittens.

Hoodies. Of course. How could we not mention hooded tops! You could get thin hooded tops to stick under long-sleeved tees. Or fat hoodies to wear on top of all your other layers, preferably with a really baggy cardigan over the top.

Hair was ideally lank, for boys, or stiff with yesterday’s sweat from a gig. Dye jobs were common, especially bleached hair, but they were irregular - having your roots show for anything up to three inches was common in grunge style. As Hole singer Courtney Love testified in interviews, her rocking layered haircut was mostly achieved by holding her cigarette to close to her hair ends and burning it off by mistake. The word we are looking for is unkempt.

Accessories - Beanie hats. Or leather thongs tied round your wrists. Grunge fashion wasn’t huge on accessories, unless it was tattoos, piercings and lots of dangly things round the wrist.

Essentially, grunge was/is/shall be again a non-style created by poor kids who wanted to reject the commodification of their world.

Boys - aim to look one hot meal away from homeless.

Girls - you can up the punk rock quota. Female grunge bands usually did. They wore the heavy boots, but usually with punk net tights (with holes in, of course). Kilts and silk slips (or other charity shop dresses) and the usual punk rocker wear were common for girls. So long as the hair was unkempt, the boots were big, the clothes were old and ill-fitting, you were pretty much grunge. Especially if you threw a baggy old cardigan with hole-thumbs over the top of your sexy rock outfit.

Getting into grunge fashion is, even today, easy and cheap. No-one sells cardigans or plaid or flannel for huge amounts on eBay - it’s all still stuff you can root around and find in second hand stores, or that people want to throw away.

However, be aware that - by trawling the second hand shops in the new millenium - you may actually find yourself part of a new wave grunge. Entirely by accident. Just because you have the same anti-commerical ethos, but different things are now available in the shops. Don’t worry. Your slightly different look will probably still be grunge. There may be people out there doing the same as you, creating a new, organic style purely by chance.

And with grunge it was always about the gigs, in the end. Let music, poverty and social alienation lead the way, and we’ll all shuffle forward into a Brave New Grunge!

 Capitol Hill “a neighborhood that doesn’t fit easy stereotypes.” 

Pop culture, capitol hill. (This blog will now be mostly focusing on Pop Culture of CH/Seattle for our project).

“While not a theme restaurant in the strict sense, Easy Joe’s does give a nostalgic nod to another time. Derek and Bart are both products of late 60’s, early 70’s middle-American suburbia and wanted to celebrate the unique popular culture of that era. Touches like fun patterned wall paper, colorful vinyl tablecloths, and even a poster of Joe Namath in the bar are some of the touches that evoke those simpler times. But this light and casual feel does not come without attention to detail. For instance, the wallpaper is from Germany, the tablecloths are custom made in England and the retro pendant lamps will be special ordered.”

source.