Fans react to YSL selling $4000 Nirvana merchandise: "Kurt rolling in his grave over this nonsense"

"The Vintage" drop Saint Laurent Rive Droite is selling perhaps the world's most expensive vintage Nirvana T-shirts, ranging from US $990 to $4,450 for an original Incesticide T-shirt.⁠

It's important to note that these aren't YSL-branded plain t-shirts that have been printed with Nirvana's designs; they're actual vintage Nirvana merchandise which bastardises the ethos of what Kurt Cobain and co stood for. "He was all about making nirvana as accessible as possible. just more rich people BS," commented one user underneath the post.

Burned Out – a vintage t-shirt re-seller that does a lot of their business trading via their Instagram page – commented: "4x market value markup for it to come in a $.5 plastic YSL bag lol". A lot of their own Nirvana stock has been acquired by trading with other vintage collectors, as well as scouring vintage markets.

Whilst they recognise that they have a precious bit of history on their hands, their prices have always been reasonably affordable, allowing others the opportunity to own rare stock from some of their favourite artists.

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Other users have made the fair point that Cobain himself would probably be outraged at the prices. "Kurt, the man who’s [sic] jaw dropped at Madonna charging 50$ [sic] a ticket would’ve definitely hated $4k shirts," one person said, whilst another added: "Kurt Cobain didn’t even want his fans to pay too much for tickets. $4,000 for band merch probably making him roll in his grave".

It's unsurprising that YSL have set such a high price on their Nirvana merch, since Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar that was used during his MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, just five months before he died, was sold at auction in 2021 for over $8,000,000, making this one of the most expensive pieces of music memorabilia ever sold.

Other bizarre items include a life size golden statue of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, which sold for a whopping $7,466,000 in 2001, and John Lennon's cardboard "bed peace" sign which he was famously photographed with in 1969 when himself and his wife Yoko Ono took to their bed for two weeks to protest against the Vietnam War. They held two week-long Bed-ins for Peace, one at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and one at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.