Marc Jacobs was inspired by Nirvana when he designed his iconic Perry Ellis Spring 1993 collection.
Marc Jacobs
The 56-year-old fashion designer is set to receive MTV's first-ever Fashion Trailblazer Award at the upcoming Video Music Awards as a partnership between the television council and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).
And the fashion guru - who famously worked with the band Sonic Youth for their 1992 music video 'Sugar Kane' - has now opened up about being influenced by the grunge scene in the '90s, and creating his Perry Ellis line - which was reissued in 2018 due to its popularity - that was heavily inspired by the 'Come As You Are' rockers.
He said: "Nobody had introduced me to Nirvana. It was like a magnet, and that's how I feel a lot of my life was. It wasn't something I sought out; it just affected me immediately.
"I had a primitive connection to Sonic Youth and Nirvana and a lot of other things at that time. But again, it felt very authentic and not that I had to learn it or find it. That was my same experience with punk rock back in the '70s, when I just saw how cool the kids looked who were a part of that scene that it drew me to hear those bands."
Marc also recalled hearing the 1991 Nirvana track 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' for the first time, and immediately thinking it was a very "cool" track.
He told US Vogue: "I remember travelling to Europe - I was in Berlin, and I walked into a bar with some friends, and I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. Then I went to San Francisco at some point, and it was playing, and I was just like, 'This is so big.' It felt very big even in kind of under-the-radar places. Even my thoughts about MTV then were that, although it seemed like it had a commercial responsibility, it was definitely aware of what was cool."
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