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SOUNDGARDEN in Seattle, January 1994. From left: Matt Cameron, Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd, and Chris Cornell. © ED SIRRS

CANDLEBOX impersonating Courtney Love in a 1995 Rocket cover shoot outtake. From left: Peter Klett, Kevin Martin, Scott Mercado, and Bardi Martin. © KAREN MOSKOWITZ

KIM THAYIL The height of absurdity? Gosh, one of the first things that comes to mind is the Vogue spread about grunge fashion. Having models walking the runways in Milan in some kind of flannel skirts—I embraced it, on some level, because there’s an element of parody in it.

ROBERT SCOTT CRANE I dated some models back then. It was really kind of a tragic thing—girls in their young twenties were suddenly doing heroin because that’s what was cool to do. All of a sudden, at the Crocodile you saw all of these really pretty girls, instead of just the grunge girls, and they were all fucking high. These people are here because this music is on MTV, and Kate Moss is on the cover of the magazine looking like she’s from Auschwitz.

PETER BAGGE (Hate cartoonist) I’m so out of it, I didn’t even realize how prevalent heroin use was in the grunge scene. I drew the band the character Stinky managed, and I was trying to think of the most absurd lyrics I could think of, so I had the singer scream, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for heroin!” I picked heroin to be “out there”—you know, freak out the parents. Then I was informed that heroin was a scourge. (Laughs.) A lot of people in the music scene were very upset. But then I found out there were people I knew who were heroin addicts and who thought it was hilarious! Like Mark Arm. He thought it was a riot.

Pavitt and Poneman also thought it was hilarious, and a couple of times they asked me to do variations on that for them for T-shirts or posters or ads. They had me do “I scream, you scream, we all scream for a fashion spread in Vogue!”

KELLY CURTIS Marc Jacobs approached me about Eddie, probably for a fashion layout or something. A bunch of people did. There’s so many crazy offers that have come our way over the last 20 years. You name it—every corporation or advertisement or reality-TV show or starring vehicle or pajama company. Ninety-nine percent of it, I just say no.

LINDA DERSCHANG In a way, “grunge fashion” was a nonfashion. That’s why it was so funny that it turned into a Marc Jacobs line for Perry Ellis. Marc Jacobs was fired from Perry Ellis after that line came out. Which was, in a way, also pretty funny.

MARC JACOBS (fashion designer) We were fired from Perry Ellis. I think there were a lot of reasons. People love to attribute it to the fact that this grunge collection was so controversial and outrageous and whatever, but … very often the designer collection isn’t really the moneymaking thing, it’s really the icing on the cake, and it’s something that promotes the image of the company. But that part was financed by Perry Ellis, the company itself, whereas all the other things, like Perry Ellis shirts, the menswear, the jeans, those were all licensed, so the expenses were taken care of outside. So, of course we did this grunge collection, and it was very controversial. Anyway, somewhere just after that, they decided they didn’t want to continue with the whole idea of a woman’s collection on that level or on that scale.

COURTNEY LOVE Marc sent me and Kurt his Perry Ellis grunge collection. Do you know what we did with it? We burned it. We were punkers—we didn’t like that kind of thing.

NEAL KARLEN (journalist; Babes in Toyland biographer) “Kinderwhore” fashion was personified by the babydoll dress, clothes that would look very Lolita-ish on 25-year-old women. Kat Bjelland from Babes in Toyland took that fashion on as this sort of symbol of her music and who she was. And it became a big deal when Courtney became so big and claimed this look as her own. She ripped off Kat’s act.

For a short time, Courtney Love was in the band that evolved into Babes in Toyland; there’s debate between her and Kat about whether it was even called