The world-record breaking auction house, Julien’s Auctions, held its marquee music auction event MUSIC Icons on Saturday at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square. The auction was held in front of a packed crowd of collectors and music fans bidding live on the floor, online and over the phone globally. It featured items from music legends such as Queen, Elton John, Kurt Cobain, Bob Dylan and more.
Among the items sold was the iconic green cardigan worn by Nirvana’s frontman in the photo shoot for the band’s final album, In Utero.
An iconic cardigan belonging to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain has sold for $75,000, almost four times the pre-auction estimate.
In August 1993, Nirvana were gearing up to release what would become their final studio album In Utero. To promote the record, the band spent the afternoon with photographer Jesse Frohman, a photoshoot which yielded some of the most iconic images of Kurt Cobain just months before his suicide.
The photos from the shoot became incredibly famous, partly because they were some of the last professional photos ever taken of Cobain, and also because they showed the frontman at the lowest point of his emotional turmoil, and the height of the band’s success.
The acrylic and mohair cardigan worn by Cobain in the shoot was one of the most talked about items of the MUSIC Icons auction, selling for $75,000, almost four-times the original estimated price of $20,000.
Another auction sale was a used paper plate from a 1990 Nirvana show at the 9:30 nightclub in Washington DC. Kurt Cobain had handwritten a setlist in black marker on the plate after eating pizza off of it. It sold for a massive $22,000, more than ten times its estimated sale price.
