UN-Fashion -- The `Grunge Look'? Next To Hip Hop And Rave, It's Old Hat

Now that Vogue magazine, The New York Times, and tout Seventh Avenue are rhapsodizing about the "grunge look" and anointing Seattle as a fashion capital, the First Avenue and East Pike Street cafe-and-dance-club crowd that started the look are guffawing right down to their combat boots.

"Grunge" as a term that anyone remotely hip would use to describe the latest in street fashion is painfully passe, they say. Not to mention that "grunge fashion" is an oxymoron similar to "glamorous junk." How can a utilitarian outfit of thermal underwear, plaid wool shirt and ragged cut-offs be fashion, much less the kind of high fashion that chic stores in New York will soon be attempting to sell for a thousand bucks per outfit? Puh-leeeze.

"Grunge died a year and a half ago," says Jason Harler, 23, co-proprietor of the Fast Forward boutique on First Avenue and designer of a space-age-looking menswear line. "Sure, there are people still dressing like that at the Vogue, RKCNDY, maybe the Off Ramp on some nights. But grunge is over. Some people still dress grunge because this is the Northwest, with hiking boots and lots of plaid and all that. It's practical. But the biggest looks are rave and hip hop."

Observers of the young and trendy agree. Rave is what is new and far more of a fashion statement than grunge ever was. Rave is related to hip hop, which is the name of the music and the fashion created by African-American and Latino urban youths several years ago. Hip hop fashion means baggy pants, oversized baseball caps and gold chains.

But while hip hop is a style of music, raves are multimedia events that take weeks or months of preparation to plan and publicize and then occur once, perhaps on a Saturday night in a rented warehouse. Patrons pay a fee at the door and once inside are part of an all-night party. Instead of live bands, disc jockeys play tape loops of urban techno-pop. Light shows are augmented with haze or fog. People dance. And they plan what they wear.

Rave wear looks like a cross between hip hop and the cartoon-colored baggy shorts and funny hats worn by skateboarders. The look is huge jeans barely hanging off the hipbones and cinched with a belt. Sometimes the pants are cut off inches above the ankle. Big oversized T-shirts and sweatshirts with blazing graphics are worn with the big pants. Floppy, striped top hats that look straight out of Dr. Seuss can be part of the look. Striped stocking caps are also popular.

"You do see a lot of big hats at the raves," said Faith Beattie, , manager of Zebra Club, a First Avenue boutique that sells the latest in casual wear to the 15- to 25-year-old set. "They're kind of old hat in California, where they started. But they're still a big deal up here." Beattie says she wears retro '70s bell bottoms when she attends raves.

Hot street fashions are by definition last week's casserole by the time they get splashed across the pages of mainstream fashion publications. That means that "grunge" - the unfashion look that was the uniform of the Seattle grunge rock scene - is now about as trendy as meatloaf. But you can't tell from the grunge mania sweeping the world of American high fashion. Several of the nation's top fashion designers, including Marc Jacobs of Perry Ellis, devoted their spring '93 collections to what they called grunge-inspired fashion, and Details and Harper's Bazaar have spotlighted grunge fashion in recent editions.

Perhaps because it was the last of the big fashion magazines to come slouching toward Seattle in search of sludge style, Vogue has compensated by lavishing a 10-page spread on grunge in its December issue. Photographed in the Northwest by Steven Meisel, the photographer who shot Madonna for her new book, the magazine shows top New York models slumming in combat boots, threadbare plaid woodsmen jackets, and $800 granny dresses by Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.

The spread slays the young employees of Zebra Club. "Oooh, fake nose ring," chuckled Kevin Hills, 22, as he assessed one of the Vogue models. Lots of pierced body parts, including ones not normally seen in public, are a hallmark of grunge style. How could he tell? "It's too close to the edge of her nose to be real."

Beattie admitted that the torn sweaters worn by some of the models were realistic, but noted that young women around here are more likely to wear tights with cutoffs or T-shirts with overalls than dresses. All the Vogue models are wearing designer interpretations of thrift-store granny dresses. Granny dresses, part of the back-to-the-'70s look that designers are launching for spring, are the calf-length, waistless, princess-seamed floral printed dresses fashionable with counterculture types in the early '70s.

"This is really kind of funny that Vogue magazine is doing this because they really don't know what's going on," said Beattie. "The grunge scene is more a thrift-store look. Take Bridget Fonda. In `Singles,' she is dressed like a typical Seattle girl."

The movie "Singles" is indeed cinema verite when it comes to portraying grunge style. Fonda wore black tights with either tiny skirts or cutoffs, while Matt Dillon wore shapeless long shorts over thermal underwear. Both wore beat-up leather jackets and combat boots. Grunge, in fact, is more an attitude than a fashion statement. It's a gritty, greasy mating of blue-collar castoffs and urban industrial wear that is a practical wardrobe solution to both Seattle's dank climate and the question of what to wear to a sweaty dance club.

"Has grunge peaked? I don't think it's something that's become fashionable and is just going to go away. What else would you wear in Seattle?" said Linda Derschang, 35, owner of Basic, a Broadway Avenue apparel shop catering to young customers.

"If I'm going to be attending a concert and I know it's going to be crowded, people are going to be stepping on my toes," Derschang said. "So I wear shoes that I don't care if they get stepped on. And I wear an old jacket so I don't care if someone puts a cigarette out on it or spills beer on it."

Despite his observations about rave wear, Harler thinks a bigger fashion trend among young adults is that anything goes. "Lots of people are doing future-shock looks, '70s retro. I think everybody sort of does whatever they want to, and I think that's everywhere, not just Seattle."