Nearly 30 years later, Nirvana's smiley still pops up all the time. In true Gen-X style, the updated logo was given a heavy dose of irony, crossing out the eyes and adding a tongue sticking out of the mouth as if the smiley were dead. To this day, rave culture and the smiley face are synonymous, even if there was resistance when the culture hit the headlines, with the media latching on to the smiley as a symbol of hedonism.īack across the Atlantic in the early ’90s, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain bastardized the smiley for his band's logo just as Nevermind and grunge were blowing up. The decor of the club - a gym in South London with a 5 a.m. license - was covered in hand-painted smiley banners." "Their use of the icon was to convey the happy and loving vibe of the club, in no small part caused by the widespread use of ecstasy. "To my knowledge, the first use of the smiley in rave culture was on early flyers for Danny Rampling’s night Shoom, the very first Balearic house night in London, which gave birth to acid house culture in the capital," says Ollie Evans, owner of vintage retailer Too Hot Limited. Sharon Walker, reflecting on the movement 30 years later for The Guardian, wrote, "I joined the queue of kids dressed in the acid house uniform of Day-Glo dungarees and smiley T-shirts." This vision of nightclubbing couldn't have been any further from the glamorous and chic styles at nightclubs such as Studio 54 in New York 10 years prior.
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