The year was 1992; the scene, a fitting at Calvin Klein, where Nadja Auermann, the nearly two-meter-tall fashion Valkyrie, was trying on the nude-tone slip dress she was to model on Mr. Klein's runway. "She totally filled it out in this voluptuous way," recalled Nian Fish, whose job was to oversee the proceedings.

An instant later, a scrap of a girl emerged from behind the racks to shimmy into the very same dress. "It was falling away from her body," Ms. Fish said. "We put sandals on her, and the whole silhouette changed."

The girl was Kate Moss, and her fragile, faintly dissolute air heralded the sea change that would do away with the excesses of the '80s in favor of a stripped-down and louche approach to dress that would define the new decade. By the next year, Ms. Moss's boyish, undone, insistently "real" look had been appropriated by a generation.

That year was a pivotal one in the style world and the arts. "It was the year reality became hip," said Jenny Moore, associate curator of "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star," a checkered survey of the subversive art of the day on view through May 26 at the New Museum on the Bowery in New York. "We were very much at a turning point, searching for something raw and authentic, and at the same time stylizing that 'authenticity,' fictionalizing it and then feeding it back into the culture."

"The underground was going mainstream, and we were packaging it," she said.

Subversion in myriad forms was being commodified on the catwalks via the skinny tailoring of Helmut Lang, the ripped-up "deconstruction" of Belgian designers like Ann Demeulemeester and the bare-bones minimalism of Jil Sander and Mr. Klein. On the streets, the look of grunge, with its threadbare flannels, rock-chick leather jackets, flowered dolly frocks and drainpipe jeans, was having a moment.

It is a moment the style tribes have revisited repeatedly, yet it strangely persists. Grunge and its raffish offshoots are back for an encore, reborn, paradoxically, as fashion's last word.

Variations have sprung up over the years on the runways of designers like Marc Jacobs, who reprised elements of his notorious Perry Ellis grunge collection of 1994, and Alexander Wang, whose shows are often interspliced with '90s references: slouchy T-shirts, slashed leathers, gladiator boots.

But in recent months, the era of Nirvana, Starbucks and heroin chic has been exploited with a rarefied twist. Dries Van Noten revived the mood, translating the thrift-shop flannels of Seattle grunge into an upmarket pastiche of gilt-edged chiffon layers, and New Yorkers like Phillip Lim and Peter Som paraded refined riffs on grunge that would not look amiss on the tony sidewalks of Park Avenue.

The austere shapes of the early '90s were reinterpreted, as well, in the fall collection of Calvin Klein, where the global creative director Kevin Carrigan introduced a line built on long-stemmed black jeans, elongated jackets, leather shirts and dun-colored sheaths.

Grunge itself, which one might have expected to go the way of the torpedo bra, only gained traction this year when Hedi Slimane offered a homage in his fall Saint Laurent collection, conjuring the spirits of California "alternative girls" and down-and-dirty pop idols like Courtney Love.

If the look endures, there is a reason. To many, the early '90s encapsulate a golden age of untrammeled creativity before designers became megabrands. It was a time when artists of every stripe were united by a sense of shared community.

"Doc Martens - they bring a '90s feel to any outfit," said Chloe Chiappetti, a stylist, walking in a pair of them in Lower Manhattan. Nearby, Tracey Langfitt, an artist, wore a paint-spattered work shirt and a faded calf-length denim skirt. "I can't shake California grunge from my system," she said.

Fashion reflected that gritty mood, said Mr. Lim, who came of age in the '90s. "It was not so ready-made," he said. "Everything was more impulsive, less stylized," emblematic, in his rose-tinted view, of "youth, music and fun times."

The New York Times

(China Daily 05/19/2013 page12)