alright, buckle up bc its time for a bit of a history lesson:
basically the whole idea behind grunge was "fuck consumerism, fuck capitalism, fuck beauty standards and gender norms and the fashion industry. do not give a fuck about what you look like or, alternatively, intentionally look like shit. refuse to buy into beauty standards and refuse to participate in fashion trends and literally just wear the cheapest, comfiest, most practical clothes you can get your hands on (preferably second hand so as to say fuck you to corporate) and then wear those clothes until theyre literally falling apart. dont obsess over hygiene; not everything has to be squeaky clean."
and since the birthplace and capital of the genre was seattle (a northern lumberjack town), the clothes that were cheap, comfy, durable and practical around there were flannels, beanies, and big, second hand blue jeans. docs were notoriously cheap at the time, and so were military surplus boots, so thats what the bands wore, essentially. in protest against fashion, beauty standards and capitalism.
then people started wearing the same clothes as the bands and then (as with every counter culture before them) the fashion industry decided to create a cleaner, less subversive version of that. so they started selling the anti-fashion, anti-consumerist look as consumerist fashion.
fast forward to 2014 and you see people wearing an all brand new outfit consisting of black skin-tight jeans that you cant move in and that are ripped before theyre sold and dont last more than a year, $500 docs, expensive "flannels" that are too thin to be warm, a $100 beanie and on-fleek makeup that cost more than those bands lived off of at the start of their careers, took hours to apply and finally a paper thin nirvana shirt sold for 50 bucks and worn without any idea what anything but "sounds like teen spirit" sounds like (which isnt a grunge song btw; its a satirical pop song made to mock the kind of music that it is). all of it bought from hot topic or H&M and made by child slaves in china or taiwan. so, like... actually the complete opposite of what grunge is supposed to be. completely against the values of the subculture. it would literally be more grunge to wear dirty sweatpants and a second hand baseball cap than the shit being sold today.
so, yeah. grunge is supposed to be "i literally do not give two shits about how i look" and yet... and YET....... the fashion and beauty industry totally butchered it.
like, no one even seems to know what grunge even is anymore. this is how they destroy countercultures: they tried arresting hippies and noticed it didnt work. what did work was stripping the movement of all values, making it fit corporate beauty standards and selling its empty, powdered husk of a corpse to the masses until it means absolutely nothing. they did it with the hippies, they did it with punk, they did it with grunge and they'll do it with any new subculture that dares challange and oppose capitalism.
