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Who is the king of grunge?

Kurt Cobain, king of grunge, continues to inspire as a high-fashion muse.

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Saint Laurent’s latest menswear collection was titled, “A Tribute to Contemporary Californian Surf Music Culture,” but from the moment the first model hit the runway, it was clear that something else—or really someone else—was as much an inspiration: Kurt Cobain. The longish blonde hair and white plastic infinity sunglasses are unmistakable at this point, as is the mishmash of flannel, ripped jeans, and grandpa cardigans in competing colors, suggesting a dressing routine that entails picking up whatever is on the floor nearby. Cobain’s style, in that regard, makes him an ideal muse for Hedi Slimane, Saint Laurent’s highly-successful creative director. Cobain’s haphazard way of dressing fits neatly within Slimane’s approach to design. Since taking over at Saint Laurent in 2012, Slimane has predominantly made clothes that some critics have suggested are essentially reproduced vintage finds. His designs reference the faded flannels, tattered jeans, and babydoll dresses that clutter the racks of thrift shops in New York and Los Angeles, which Slimane has made his home. Those are exactly the kind of clothes Cobain routinely wore, only Slimane’s versions have high-end fabrication and exorbitant price tags.

Slimane’s collections have also consisted more of a random assortment of individually salable pieces than a set of garments designed around a concept or theme. He’s been called a curator and a stylist as much as a designer. While that approach has helped to fuel Saint Laurent’s sales, it can result in collections that look somewhat chaotic in their styling. Sound like someone else’s mode of dress?

Slimane has partly built his career on channeling the style of music icons, such as Cobain and his widow, Courtney Love, whom Slimane featured in an ad campaign for the brand. Slimane’s clothes have alluded back to Cobain and grunge a few times, as in Slimane’s second collection for Saint Laurent. Slimane is by no means alone in being enamored with Cobain’s style. Since his rise to fame with Nirvana in the Nineties and in the decades following his suicide, the king of disaffected angst has popped up again and again in the work of fashion luminaries, including Marc Jacobs and Raf Simons. Japanese designer Takahiro Miyashita practically idolizes Cobain. Dries Van Noten devoted his spring-summer 2013 women’s collection to exploring Cobain’s look. The paradox of all this, obviously, is that Cobain would have hated being a muse to any high-fashion label. In 1992, when Marc Jacobs sent Cobain and Love his famous grunge collection for Perry Ellis—the one that would establish Jacobs’s name as well as get him fired—the couple didn’t take kindly to the gesture. “We burned it,” Love told WWD (paywall) in 2010. “We were punkers—we didn’t like that kind of thing.” The closest Cobain probably came to embracing high fashion was in a photo shoot for Mademoiselle magazine, where he presaged his later influence on Dries Van Noten, and wore a piece from Van Noten’s women’s collection.

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Why is it called a tritone?

In music theory, it's called the "tritone" because it's made of three whole steps. "The reason it's unsettling is that it's ambiguous, unresolved," says Gerald Moshell, Professor of Music at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

The Unsettling Sound Of Tritones, The Devil's Interval

Everyone knows the sounds of Halloween: creaky floorboards, howling winds, the amplified sound of a beating heart. But back in the day, the devil was said to exist in a particular musical tone. For centuries, it was called the devil's interval — or, in Latin, diabolus in musica. In music theory, it's called the "tritone" because it's made of three whole steps. "The reason it's unsettling is that it's ambiguous, unresolved," says Gerald Moshell, Professor of Music at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "It wants to go somewhere. It wants to settle either here, or [there]. You don't know where it'll go, but it can't stop where it is." There used to be rules against writing music that contained this interval. Moshell says that during the Renaissance, all music had one purpose: to be beautiful and express the majesty of God. Anything otherwise was studiously avoided. But once music was no longer shackled to the church, it was free to express all kinds of tension. The devil's interval was ideal for that. From classical to jazz to rock and even Broadway musicals, the tritone conveys feelings ranging from forbidden love and longing to fear and defiance. Listen below to a selection of songs that contain this unsettling tritone and hear the radio version at the audio link above.

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