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Rare & VintageMore details below ↓
Kurt Cobain Ziggy T-Shirt
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$69.00
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Measurements
Pit-to-Pit: 21.5"
Length: 29"
Condition
Vintage. No tag. Shows character consistent with age.
The Details
Months before he died, Kurt Cobain sat on the MTV Unplugged stage and sang a twenty-three-year-old David Bowie song so convincingly that a generation assumed he wrote it — a confusion Bowie spent years being needled by, kids coming up to tell him it was cool that he'd covered Nirvana. When Cobain died in April 1994, an anonymous printer answered with this: a full-coverage painted memorial, "The Man Who Sold the World" across the front, "cobain 1967–1994" worked into the art, and on the back the move that makes it art — Cobain's face wearing Bowie's lightning bolt over the lyric "you're face to face with the man who sold the world." The shirt titles itself "Nirvana Ziggy," and the reference cuts deep: Ziggy Stardust was Bowie's invented rock star destroyed by his own fame. Painting Cobain into that myth as his memorial is sharper criticism than most of what the magazines managed. The 1994 memorial all-over-prints are their own collected niche now, and this is one of the recognized designs in it.
White short sleeve cotton tee with Kurt Cobain Ziggy graphic. No tag.
Sourcing
We source these shirts from thrift stores, estate sales, and directly from bootleg and overprint collectors.
$69.00