“Then there’s things that I would collect that really have a solid place in my heart. “There are certain things that I won’t collect, sure, because I think that they’re going to depreciate in value,” he says. Kletjian is a longtime Cobain fan - he has a giant painting of the man in his kitchen - and decided the sweater would be a good investment. “When in real life the money I earned from the sweater went to boring stuff like rent, insurance and existing for a couple of years - which is exactly what I needed.” “My dream was to get a swimming pool when it sold,” she said. Since the sweater was only expected to go from $40,000 to $60,000, Farry was surprised when the numbers crept into the six figures. I remember thinking and saying that if Kurt knew the situation I was in, he would definitely want me to sell it. “Before I would commit to selling it, I got in touch with Courtney and Frances to make sure they were cool with it. “I wouldn’t have got involved if I didn’t need the money,” she said. But after 11 years of fighting cancer, she agreed to bring it to the auction house in 2015. Kurt Loder Looks Backįarry initially bequeathed the sweater to Frances in her will. Nirvana Smashed His Hotel Room - And He Covered Kurt Cobain's Death. It was around then that she gave me that cardigan.” Farry shuttled the sweater around with her for the next two decades in a safety deposit box. I remember she kept going into the bedroom closet and coming out with more. “She was giving a lot of people that knew him things he owned valuable things like sweaters. “There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house to show support and pay their respect to Courtney,” Farry says. So I liked the idea that, while he might have been tortured inside, this was a piece that offered him a bit of comfort.”įollowing Cobain’s death, the garment was gifted to the family’s nanny, Jackie Farry. I look at this sweater as something that he put on every day. “He was obviously in a bad way at the time. “I look at that sweater from a different perspective than maybe some people do,” Kletjian says. This was really kind of the security blanket of a sweater.”Ĭobain wore the sweater for months preceding his 1994 suicide, on the now-legendary Unplugged performance in November 1993 and several times on tour before his death in April. You wanted to be wrapped in something that was warm and cuddly. “Of course, it was all part of the grunge aesthetic - that you didn’t want anything too new or too pretty. And, of course, this being Seattle, it was cold, it was rainy. “It was part of a much larger trend in Seattle in the early Nineties, where people were buying vintage, recycling clothes, and creating clothes from found objects,” she says. God, I don’t want to wear this.’”Ĭobain was a frequent thrift shopper and likely purchased the sweater at a second-hand shop, according to Chrisman-Campbell. “It’s like when they say you should walk in somebody else’s shoes. “It’s kind of a weird, powerful thing when you do something like that, when we put on somebody else’s ,” he said. “The stains are still there.” Kletjian confirms that he’s kept the sweater in mint-grunge condition he put it on only once, but took it off after less than 40 seconds. “It’s very important that we don’t wash it,” Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions told Rolling Stone earlier this month. The cardigan is now worth more than 8,000 times its approximate original price - despite (or, rather, because of) the funk. However, Chrisman-Campbell located a Manhattan brand ad from the early Sixties in which a similar sweater cost $15.95. Perry Ellis no longer employs anyone who worked at Manhattan Industries during that era, so Medici can’t confirm which line the piece came from. When the sweater arrived at Kletjian’s house via overnight mail, he says, “I opened it up and it immediately hits me: ‘Oh, now I’m also going to be responsible for this.’ It was kind of like when my children were born years ago I was so happy to see them, but then I was like, ‘Oh no…’ ” Garrett Kletjian, the owner of professional race car team Forty7 Motorsports, is the current self-described “custodian” of the garment he purchased it at Julien’s Auctions in November 2015. The story of where it came from and what happened to it is more than a half-century long. But more than 25 years ago, it was wrapped around Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. The cardigan’s not studded with diamonds or knit by a couture atelier. Still, the last time it sold, it fetched a whopping $137,500. It smells like a grandmother’s musty attic. There’s a missing button and two cigarette burns. It has a mysterious stain in one of its pockets - “some kind of brown, crunchy something in there,” according to the sweater’s owner, which he guesses could be chocolate, or vomit. The world’s most expensive cardigan is locked in a gun safe in rural Pennsylvania.
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