I report today from beyond the grave. I’ve been made quite dead by my tweenage daughter, who recently informed me the term preppy equates to “people who wear Nirvana shirts.” I’d lived long enough for Carlton Banks’ ethos to be confused with Kurt Cobain’s.
Somewhere in the liminal space shortly before my demise, I tweeted (as we geriatrics are apt to do) about my kid’s conflating grunge with a term I thought should be reserved for upper-crust dorks in khakis. I was met by my fellow ’90s artifacts, who determined the world broken. Nirvana = Preppy???! The end is nigh.
To answer some upset Twitter/X users: Yes, kids these days wear the shirts, which they can buy at Nordstrom, Aeropostale, Hot Topic, H&M, Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, and Target. Some of them, at least, don’t really know the music, and refuse to feel bad about that fact. Nirvana LLC owns the copyright to the iconic smiley face with its X’s for eyes; these fast-fashion realtors transform the smiley, and other images associated with the band, into infinite variations on a theme, forming part of a growing, billion-dollar band merch market.
So grunge.
Relatedly, I tried to teach my kid the difference between the terms preppy and poser. She insisted: The Nirvana-shirted kids are preppy. This was no mere confusion in terminology.
I’d begun to think my daughter had perfectly crafted a word misusage designed to majorly break my brain, but then a few other parents chimed in that, yes, their own offspring describe other youngsters who wear, ahem, “old” band shirts as “preppy.”
On TikTok, I found a young woman showing how to style a pink Nirvana shirt with a rainbow smiley face logo. The text on her photo: “Nirvana is my favorite clothing brand btw.” A commenter noted, “my fav clothing brands are nirvana,queen,metallica,kiss and guns n’ roses.”
Of course, TikTok has its Nirvana-shirt detractors, evidently as alarmed by this trend as I am. Striking back, “preppy Nirvana” wearers respond with sarcastic humor to the claim that they can’t name a Nirvana song. Who cares?
Never mind.
I spoke to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian who has written about preppiness as an American style. After we first emailed, Petrzela asked her own 11-year-old about Nirvana shirts being preppy, and her daughter granted, “Maybe, like, a pink one.”
Her daughter, like mine, associates other brands (not just bands) with the moniker preppy: Drunk Elephant and Glow Recipe skin care, Lululemon leggings. (My daughter gave me a heads-up that Roller Rabbit pj’s are also preppy.) Petrzela thinks her daughter’s terminology has evolved, that she’s gone from seeing these things as “expensive” to “trendy” and, therefore, “preppy.”
For me, the line between “preppy” and “expensive” tracks. In my teen years, I saw preppy as the uniform of the rich, a toned-down version of the outfits worn by the cast of the movie Clueless: cute blazers, sharp collars, and sweater vests. Hasn’t preppy always been the look of private-school blue bloods?
As I learned from Avery Trufelman’s excellent podcast series American Ivy, preppy fashion post–World War II was an evolution that built on students’ adoption of sporting polo shirts, slip-on shoes, and newly softened standard items such as blazers (by then, worn without shoulder pads) at Princeton and on other campuses. This drove sales of ready-made menswear, eventually adopted by women in smaller sizes. Leading the trend, Brooks Brothers offered off-the-rack, but finely cut clothing for upwardly mobile young people.
Prep adapted further. Petrzela gave the example of khakis. In the 1940s, the G.I. Bill flooded college campuses with students from new socioeconomic backgrounds, and their fatigues led to a new favorite fashion among Ivy Leaguers: khakis. Before that time, the now-ubiquitous posh-lite slacks had not been part of preppy fashion. These pants didn’t require ironing and, as Petrzela noted in the New Republic, “no-frills khakis, paired with a J. Press blue blazer, became a prep staple in this era.”
What started as a university style could have faded after the advent of hippie fashion in the U.S. if not for pioneering Japanese fashion designer Kensuke Ishizu. The father of Japanese prep captured what was left of the Ivy look in his 1965 photo book Take Ivy, which inspired a generation of Japanese youth to adopt the style. Eventually, in the 1970s, American preppy clothing brands moved to department stores in Japan. The fashion thrived on both sides of the globe through the ’80s. People—especially women—needed business-casual clothing that was comfortable but conveyed upward mobility.
As Trufelman says in her podcast, over time and subsequent generations, Ivy (prep) became less aspirational and more a sort of middle-class uniform in the U.S., one that “masked class to some degree so the bosses and employees dressed the same.” Today, Trufelman notes, terms like Ivy and preppy hardly need to be used as hallmarks of the look—so many of us dress in reference to it that some items are hardly noticeable as preppy. Chinos have become just … clothes. Oxford button-downs are just dress shirts. Maybe prep is everywhere, has become democratized to such a degree that the umbrella of its meaning is remarkably wide.
“Often, I think people of our age can think preppy is defined by its timelessness or static nature,” Petrzela told me. Some define prep by certain component parts—Oxford shirts, khakis, loafers—typifying prep’s unchangingness. However, “this aesthetic has always been more elastic than we think and has sometimes absorbed or co-opted or been shaped by more working-class fashions.”
In the 1990s, back when Kurt Cobain was the prophet of flannel-clad thrift shoppers, preppy clothing brands were going through their own evolution. Snoop Dogg and other artists adopted Tommy Hilfiger, and Raekwon donned Ralph Lauren, making the brands less country club and more a mainstay of Yo! MTV Raps. They were, as Petrzela put it, “claiming and appropriating a look that was never made for them.” But then, “those brands realized there was a real market for this look, and their designs actually started shifting, at least in certain lines, in order to serve that demographic and the many people who were emulating it.”
Maybe tweens in Lululemon are the Snoop Doggs of 2023, with tastemaking falling into the hands of any 11-year-old with access to a cellphone.
It can be horrifying, or at least incongruous, to see symbols of grunge bands like Nirvana, which might once have been associated with a sort of dropout or anti-capitalist ethos, being sold on every fast-fashion platform. Petrzela comforted me (or, I think this was meant to be comfort): “The notion of selling out doesn’t exist for these kids in the way that we used to think of it. If Nirvana or Pearl Jam had done a soap commercial, for instance, fans in the ’90s would have been undone.” But, she continued, “I just think influencer culture, and a certain cynicism about the durability of capitalism, means that kids don’t really think that way.”
Even with all of these extremely reasonable explanations, I couldn’t help but feel as if the specific pairing of Nirvana with preppy was specially designed to screw with the minds of Xennial parents. I can understand a clothing line expanding to attract a new consumer base or the rich adopting a working-class-coded item or two, but what my kid (and the chic goofballs on TikTok) is doing seemed like a purposeful inversion. A bastardization of language. An attack on grunge!
I turned to Valerie Fridland, a linguist who specializes in slang and happens to be the mother of teenagers. Her son gets annoyed at people who wear Nirvana shirts (at 17, he has the anti-establishment soul of an older man); her daughter wears the Nirvana shirts with her Lululemon leggings.
Focusing on how the term preppy could have mutated so, Fridland told me that generally when language changes, it’s usually over generations of people using a word in a slightly different way, until it’s almost unrecognizable. Very, for instance, used to mean “true” or “actual.” Now it means just “extremely so.” But in slang, “there’s almost a purposeful, kind of subjective reinvention” of existing words that “subverts its meaning.” Salty, for example, has gone from being a flavor to a spiky attitude of annoyance or anger. In the eighties, bad meant “good.”
And, to be fair, zoomers and alphas are not the only generations guilty of co-opting past generations’ bands via T-shirt. In the 1990s, I sported a black Beatles tee that I’m pretty sure I bought at Spencer’s Gifts. Of course, I had the sense to stock up on Beatles CDs (thanks, Columbia House and BMG), as I would have been mortified to be caught in the shirt without being able to give a proper discography. Other kids at school wore Grateful Dead shirts with enough commitment that it became a persona and uniform. Maybe we, too, were trying to telegraph belonging to a type. It’s just that then, clothing aesthetics didn’t have our modern levels of specificity achieved via the speedy metabolism of social media. Terms like cottagecore or coastal grandma would have been meaningless to us.
Fridland is not convinced that kids using the term preppy today know what the word meant in the ’90s. They don their Nirvana or Sublime shirts, “co-opting a sort of cool, older … throwback aesthetic that is more about a lifestyle aesthetic than an understanding of what those bands meant or anything about that cultural history at all.”
Not all adults have negative associations with preppiness, she reminded me. For some, “it was kind of maybe that you were obnoxious and upper crust, but it wasn’t a negative,” Fridland noted, pointing to Clueless as an example—for some, the movie might have represented an aspirational upmarket lifestyle. The kids wearing Nirvana (and Sublime) shirts with their Lululemon leggings, she said, “tend to be the kids that are very much into style and fashion” and perhaps really are “the modern preps.”
I admitted to Fridland that I used to dress my son, when he was a baby, in a Pink Floyd onesie. (He was especially responsive to their music in utero.) I started to wonder: Are parents responsible for this? By dropping these kids, from birth, into band shirts for which they had no context, did we participate in turning artists into logos? We’re the weirdos who Kidz Bop’d our preschoolers through pop culture. Is it any wonder they’re adopting fragments of cultural artifacts (the logo) without the whole (the music)?
These kids are (sort of) appreciating their parents’ favorite bands, and that, I realize, doesn’t seem especially covert or rebellious. Dressing to please one’s parents, I wonder: Isn’t that the heart of prep?
A few days ago, I was driving my son and a friend home from practice, as moms do. I’d exhausted my own children’s interest in the topic, so I asked my son’s 14-year-old pal if he would call someone in a Nirvana shirt preppy. He was thoughtful for a moment, then told me, “It depends who is wearing it.”
An aesthetic (a word that used to mean something entirely different) is more readily defined as a “vibe” now, a visual persona you carry around with you. As far back as the ’50s, greasers and beatniks were differentiating themselves from socs and jocks. The hippies briefly swamped out prep. For a long time, young people have signaled where they fit and who they want to be with their look. That’s nothing new. The agility the internet provides, where hyper-niche aesthetics can rise and vanish, almost demands a certain level of play with language and image.
It depends who is wearing it.
Nirvana on a fortysomething is a callback (and maybe a clinging-on). A kid in a pink Nirvana sweatshirt might be … preppy? Language is not broken. It’s bending.
