Marc Jacobs created Perry Ellis’s 1993 grunge collection shown at New York Fashion Week.
Jacobs was Perry Ellis’s womenswear designer when he presented a collection inspired by grunge, including flannel shirts, knit caps, loose silhouettes and deliberately casual styling. The show became a landmark because it brought an underground music-and-streetwear vocabulary onto a major American runway.
Perry Ellis dismissed Jacobs after the collection, and the designer soon focused on developing his own label. Although the show was commercially controversial, it helped establish Jacobs as a designer willing to translate youth culture into luxury fashion.
The collection is often described as the “grunge collection.” It should not be confused with Jacobs’s later grunge-inspired work for his own brand or with the broader grunge trend of the early 1990s.