Grunge Style and Fashion

Note: This post mainly details the look of grunge, not the music. Stay tuned for more in-depth grunge music posts at some later date.

In every decade, for all squeaky clean bubble gum pop actions there develops an opposite and angstier reaction. It's a law of subculture physics. Mainstream culture is simply too narrow and too goody-goody to encompass the whole of the youth population. The 70s gave us hippies, the 80s punk rock mavens, and the 90s bore us the Generation X-level gloom of grunge. Youth culture can not subsist on good clean fun alone; it needs an introspective core to lend some much-needed depth and idealistic values to the mix.

Does that mean we'll look back on emo kids in twenty years and appreciate their wealth of feelings and eye-obscuring well-sculpted haircuts? Maybe. Only time can tell the youth subculture story for the ages. When we're in the midst of a movement, it's tough to imagine the cultural impact it will have on our retrospective summary of a decade. In the early 90s, grunge was just a burdgeoning lifestyle movement that endorsed limited showering. We could not have known at the time that it would have the iconic impact it did on the face of an era.


The Pacific Northwest was a fitting setting for the rising music subcultural movement; rainy Seattle weather provided an appropriately gloomy backdrop for the angst-ridden alternative lifestyle. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden released records with a unique and distinctly resonant sound. The grunge movement was borne of a blended puree of idealism and cynicism, encompassing the themes of Generation X disillusionment with societal norms. The Seattle Music scene provided a showcase for the encapsulation of youth subculture burnout, giving voice to artists outside of the mainstream.

Like all pure, genuine social movements, it wasn't long before The Man found a cunning way to capitalize on the rise of Grunge culture. It's the ultimate irony of alternative youth culture: it rises through sincere and meaningful expression, only to be diluted into a marketable, packageable blurb for distribution. Grunge was a lucrative business; much to the chagrin of Grunge scene musicians, their music skyrocketed to popularity in conventional circles. While these artists rose to fame for their elucidation of their innermost alienation and disillusionment, suddenly their music was playing on a top 40 station and their faces were adorning concert t-shirts.

Since I am by no means a music expert and was a mere nine years old at the height of the grunge scene's popularity, I won't pretend to have a comprehensive knowledge of the nuances and subtleties of Seattle Sound. I'm far more qualified to outline the Grunge fashion that filtered down into mainstream society. We may not have been great thinkers and expressionists, but we could rock a mean flannel. Inasmuch, retailers could charge a hefty price in their principle-free exploitation of interest in Grunge culture with their shameless marketing of items like these:

Plaid Flannel

Possibly one of the most recognizable and iconic of grunge influences, plaid flannel became a staple in both male and female early 90s' wardrobes. Optional but suggested: flannel worn open over grungy tee shirt. I would also accept "worn around the waist."

Thermal Tops

Seattle weather can get pretty chilly, so for practicality's sake a thermal shirt provided Grungy youth with some much needed warmth. This was far less practical in cities like LA and Miami, of course, where the wearer usually sacrificed a great deal of literal sweat in the name of alternative fashion.

Combat Boots

It's hard to clomp around angstily without the proper footwear. Clunky, heavy boots fit the bill, hindering the element of surprise in any attempt to sneak up on people.

Birkenstocks

For warm days when clunking around just wouldn't do, there were Birkenstocks. After all, who espouses free expression and independent thought better than the Germans? No one, that's who.

Wool Caps

Hot or cold, wool caps were more of a statement piece than a practicality. Even respected designers began sending their models down the runway with unkempt hair tucked under ski caps, though their motivation may have been tied to the savings in hairstylist costs.


Torn Jeans

How is anyone going to know that you don't care what you're wearing and that you're above superficial wardrobe selection unless you carefully choose a garment to express that sentiment? Torn jeans frequently topped off grungy ensembles, indicating the general apathy associated with the movement. Take that, society! Our jeans are well-ventilated and anti-mainstream culture.


Similarly, non-clothing fashion assimilated accordingly to sufficiently match our dirt-spackled wardrobe. Your grunge look just wouldn't be complete without:

Greasy, stringy hair

No grunge look worth its weight in hair oil would hold its own without an unkempt mass of dirty, stringy hair. Men and women alike hopped on the greasy hair bandwagon, abandoning showering in favor of a more in-your-face, anti-hygiene look. The fad grew out of Grunge musician's genuine angst and apathy, but it gave the rest of us an excuse to be lax in our showering schedules.

Questionable Facial Hair

A scraggly beard could serve as a major credibility booster for your supposed anti-society attitude. It wasn't a necessary element, but the presence of some ratty facial hair could probably help your cause in establishing yourself as legitimately grungy.


Grunge as a youth subculture ran far deeper than the fashion it inspired, but this highly visible representation played a major role in propagating the trends worldwide. For those of us not lucky or adolescent enough to rebel against anything, Grunge style allowed us to express ourselves in an allegedly unconventional way. Everyone else may have been doing it, but magazines and TV were telling us it was the way to be alternative, hip, and anti-mainstream. They would know, right?

Klutz Books

Have you ever longed to fashion your hair in a complicated four-strand fishtail braid? How about learning to juggle beanbags? Perhaps a strong desire to master the game of jacks? Or maybe you were just looking to learn some impressive cat's cradle party tricks? Whatever the highly esoteric interest, it seemed the ever-creative Klutz Press had a book for you. I'm not sure what level of mind-readers they employed throughout the 90s, but it seemed the moment I developed an interest in anything there they were were with a full-color how-to guide. Pretty good.

There was something that felt devilishly forbidden about selecting a book with toys, games, or tricks attached. It felt sort of like cheating. Our parents brought us to the bookstore in hopes of us developing a strong and complex love affair with classical literature, only to leave with a how-to book on cootie catchers complete with step-by-step instructions and origami paper.

The purchase wasn't a total loss--these interactive and highly durable books had the power to entertain us for hours. Some of them even managed to sneak in some science or math learned, though many of books are blissfully unrelated to anything remotely academic. Our parents were usually more than happy to sacrifice our potential intellectual growth for some much-needed quiet time. The pure level of focus and intensity with which these books consumed us were probably worth several times their $14.95 price tag. $14.95 is, after all, a small price to pay for an afternoon of activity fixation. It was by no means a permanent solution to our perpetual juvenile boredom, but the series developed enough kid-friendly titles to keep us sufficiently occupied for long stretches of time.

It's still tough for me to walk by a Klutz display in the children's section at Barnes and Noble without some tug of biblical-level covetousness. Maybe it's just the kid in me, but it feels like even my external adult wants some part in learning to wrap my hair in colorful embroidery floss patterns or cracking road trip boredom-curing brain teasers. Klutz Press has a little something for everyone; their how-to books have the power to convince us we can conquer any task or learn any skill...until we actually sit down and try, of course. It's often far too complicated. Regardless, at least they gave us the license to try. That's got to count for something, somewhere.

Klutz released dozens of interactive children's books throughout our childhood period, so it's nearly impossible to categorize all of the most memorable. We can look at a few examples here, but feel free to share your own favorites in the comments. Just because I never owned Klutz's Most Amazing Thumb Doodles Book doesn't mean it didn't have a disproportionately profound impact on your growth and development.

Jacks
Some of these were just masquerading as books; they hadn't truly earned their spot on bookstore shelves, they were simply granted it by size default. In reality, books like the Jacks guide were nothing more than a set of game pieces paired with an oversized instruction manual. Nevertheless, it was an easy-to-read introduction to onesies, twosies, the whole shebang. I've yet to conquer sixsies.

The Klutz Book of Magic

I'm still determined to master these tricks. I never really had the patience for them when I was in the book's intended 9-12 age range, but if I had I like to imagine I'd be onstage somewhere freeing someone from an Aztec Tomb as The Final Countdown dramatically plays me out. The Amazon reviewers swear it has given them a career in birthday party and nursing home performance, so I feel pretty inadequate over my post-book lack of magical marketability.

Hairstyles
Mock if you must, but I once took a hairstyling class at a children's creative gift shop that came with this book. It was something of a dream come true. This book taught me everything I know about securing my hair into an element-proof braid to disguise its listlessness after a long night of weekday drinking. Thanks, Klutz Press!

The Official Koosh Book: Kooshy Games and Activities


If you've got the word Kooshy as a major descriptor in your title, you've got to know it's going to be nonstop rubber filament-filled fun. From "Koosh the Koosh" to "Where the Koosh at?" it's pretty much a non-stop thrill ride.

Card Games

The guys at Klutz had a seemingly never-ending supply of card games, tricks, and handy attached decks with which to learn some serious skills. I'm sure our parents were so proud when we started referring to ourselves as the book's cover did as "Card Sharks."

Cootie Catcher
Most of us didn't need a book to learn this, but it certainly didn't hurt as a useful guide for variety and style choice. It even came with some preprinted cards that only required folding. Brilliant.

Explorabook
Touted by Klutz as "A Kids' Science Museum in a Book," Explorabook was the perfect solution to a nerdy kid's abundance of spare time. All you needed was a magnet, a mirror, and a few other goodies and you were well on your way to independent science project mastery.

Stop! The Watch: A Book of Everyday, Ordinary, Anybody Olympics


Further proof that children are incredibly easily amused. All we need is a stopwatch and we're set. We're also ready and going, possibly on our marks. Are you feeling any of these stopwatch jokes? I'm laying them on pretty thick.

Boondoggle
Who says lanyard is just for summer camp? Klutz encouraged us to engage in plastic lacing year round, leaving our parents to wonder what exactly they were going to do with a twelfth neon keychain.

Devil Sticks

These were a pretty popular pastime in the 90s, but the maneuvers could be pretty tricky. I never managed to master it, but I also never owned the book. Or the sticks. A girl can dream, though.

Kid Travel

We had this one in my family, and it truly was a lifesaver. In the days before portable DVD players, we needed something to keep our attention deficit prone brains occupied. This book more than fit the bill with its puzzles, games, and activities. Parents everywhere rejoiced wildly.

Cat's Cradle
This book taught us the ultimate distraction with the simplest of tools: a single unending round piece of string that we could arrange into various tangles and finger-squishing configurations. It may not have been rocket science, but it was challenging in a mind-numbing kind of way.


These books are just the tip of the Klutz Press iceberg. The company released dozens of books throughout the 90s, most of which provoked our creative spirit and entertained our hard-to-focus minds. And if they gave our parents a few minutes of much-needed sanity, well, that was just icing on the how-to book cake.

Dumb and Dumber

Sometimes, the title says it all. Name subtlety is for art house films and froufrou documentaries; if the Farrelly Brothers are masterminding the film, you can bet the title will be straightforward enough to describe the premise exactly without throwing in any frilly metaphors or double entendres. In the case of Dumb and Dumber, the title referred not only to the movie's main characters but also to the level of humor likely to be present throughout. Don't say they didn't warn you--it's exactly what it says on the label.

The movie's premise and content was, as it claimed, pretty dumb. My mother continues to use Dumb and Dumber as a reference point for all other slapstick films she is unlikely to enjoy based on their juvenile humor and lack of Lifetime movie tearjerking circumstances. Her use of the movie as a scale of stupidity isn't without its merits, though the rest of us did enjoy Dumb and Dumber. Nevertheless, she grumbled through the theatrical showing in 1994 and at every subsequent slapstick comedy trailer in the interim years. I don't believe I can count the number of times I've had to respond to "Is this going to be like Dumb and Dumber?" Apparently its dumbness was memorable enough to build the movie its own dreaded comedic category in our household movie selection process.



Dumb and Dumber is a quintessential example of a gross-out comedy, playing everything for laughs. It's not without its heartfelt and sincere moments, but for the most part the movie sacrifices all else in the name of the almighty punchline. Based on the movie's immense popularity, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Dumb and Dumber reiterates the notion that sometimes a comedy can just be a comedy: pure, unadulterated fun punctuated with near-incessant jokes and broad stroke concepts that boil down to nothing weightier than an audience guffaw or two. It's not high art, certainly, but its humor proved enough of a draw to pull in major box office numbers.

Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels costar as Lloyd and Harry, a limousine driver and pet washer respectively who live together in an apartment that can flatteringly be referred to as a dump. Lloyd has a gig driving the beautiful Mary (Carrey's now ex-wife Lauren Holly) to the airport and becomes highly distraught to find that she left her fancy briefcase on the floor of the crowded airport terminal. Determined to reunite his attractive client with her misplaced luggage, Lloyd retrieves the case. Lloyd is unsurprisingly unaware of the money-filled briefcase's role as ransom to appease Mary's husband's kidnappers and thus bungles the entire scheme, blissfully ignorant of his misdoings the full way through.



In typical 90s comedy fashion, the whole set-up is a spiraling mess of misunderstandings and bumbling interventions, leading to generically villainous bad guys in hot pursuit of our generally oblivious lead characters. The good guys are good only in the sense that they are painstakingly trusting and bafflingly innocent; Harry and Lloyd are by no means heroic. They're just a couple of guys who managed to get themselves into the wrong place at the wrong time, but their buffoonish lack of reason protects them from realizing potential danger and harm.



Through a series of unfortunate and probably foreseeable circumstances, Harry and Lloyd find themselves unemployed and out of luck. The comedic premise may be formulaic, but it effectively gets us from point A to point B. The intended thug recipients of the briefcase mistakenly suspect Lloyd and Harry to be some sort of secret agents, break into their apartment, and commit some very unfortunate parakeetacide. Lloyd comes up with the brilliant plan to track down Mary in Aspen--the destination of the flight to which he drove her by limo and collected her apparently forgotten briefcase. They hop into the grooming site Sheepdog van and embark on a quest of misadventures.



All sorts of humorous elements go awry, and our eponymously dumb protagonists end up slumming it to Aspen on a crappy motorbike. They have a run-in at a diner with the bad guys, but as expected they manage to subvert their advances through total lack of awareness. The duo opens the briefcase and quickly begins the process of replacing the cold hard cash with warm soft IOUs.



Lloyd and Harry do miraculouly manage to track down Mary, and hilarity predictably ensues. They vie for Mary's nonexistent affection, both mistakenly interpreting her kindness as romantic advances. It all culminates in a final hotel room showdown in which our famously dumb friends somehow manage to outsmart the bad guy goons and play an active role in reuniting Mary with her captive husband. All's not totally well that ends well, though: Harry and Lloyd reiterate their stupidity by misinterpreting and declining a once-in-a-dumb-lifetime opportunity to work as oil boys for the Hawaiian Tropic model tour bus. Tough break.



The entire movie seems rooted in the comedic tradition of rapid succession jokes and gags. They may be hit or miss, but they come skyrocketing toward the audience with such transitionless speed that we quickly forget the flops and focus on the winners. The plot is almost peripheral to the thrust of the film: the major focus is on rapid-fire punchlines. That's okay, though; unlike my mother with her intense hatred of this film, most of go to see comedies with the expectation that they will make us laugh. We don't need character development and profound conflict resolution. All it takes is a slew of jokes funny of us to distract us from the film's glaring flaws and we're happy to roll with it. If you're the type who finds plot holes and inconsistency hair-tearingly bothersome, slapstick comedy in this vein is probably not for you. For the rest of us, though, Dumb and Dumber is a great exercise in learning to just laugh it off.