Photo via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Kurt Cobain died on April 5, 1994. Within weeks, bootleg memorial shirts were being sold on sidewalks in Seattle, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, on St. Mark's Place in New York, and in every city with a screen printer and a generation of kids who needed to do something with what they were feeling. The shirts were not authorized. They were not tasteful. Many of them were beautiful.
The particular genre of memorial tee that emerged — childhood photo, birth-death dates, maybe a lyric — has its own design language now. It's the same template that gets applied to Tupac, to Biggie, to anyone who dies young and famous. But in 1994 it was still new, or at least it felt new. Nobody had designed a system for mass-producing grief on cotton. People just did it because the alternative was doing nothing.
This shirt uses a childhood school photo. Not the iconic shot from the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, not the Unplugged cardigan, not any of the images that would eventually become the Kurt Cobain brand. A school photo. He looks like a kid. He was a kid. The text reads KURT D. COBAIN (1967-1994). That's it.
The Cobain estate, managed by Courtney Love and later by Frances Bean Cobain, has licensed his image extensively in the decades since. You can buy authorized Nirvana merch at Target now. You can get a Kurt Cobain Funko Pop. The distance between a 1994 bootleg memorial shirt and a 2024 Target hoodie is thirty years and an entire philosophical journey about what happens to grief when it becomes intellectual property.
We're not making a judgment. We're saying this shirt is from the before — from the first year, from the impulse, from someone with a screen press who needed to mark the moment. It's vintage condition. It came from a collector. There's only one. That's the whole point of carrying it: it's a thing that was made once, by hand, because someone felt something.
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Header image: Photo: Tijs van Leur via Unsplash