No edgy grunge-loving 13-year-old kid in black skinny jeans and an emo fringe would be complete without a shirt adorned with the infamous Nirvana smiley face logo on it.
If you weren’t one of these kids, you probably would have seen someone with either a midriff or parody version of the design, and now fashion label Marc Jacobs is trying to say that it never even belonged to Nirvana in the first place!
Marc Jacobs has just released a shirt remarkably similar to the original design, defending their production with claims that there remains little certainty around who created the logo to begin with.
In a 2018 court case led by the remaining members of the disbanded grunge icons, a Californian court affirmed that the band did, in fact, retain copyrighted ownership over the symbol and that any unauthorised reproductions would be an infringement of the copyright clause.
When remaining members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic were questioned about who was responsible for the smiley faces’ original creation, they both admitted that they couldn’t pin it down to a clear and exact point of origin.
Rather than to back down from the strong case which Nirvana holds against the fashion label, Marc Jacobs has opted to countersue the band based on the ambiguities surrounding the logo’s creation.
Looks like the days of shitty band logo reproductions are far from over… here we go again.
