After six years of legal battles, the legendary grunge band and luxury fashion house are reaching settlement over the use of a smiley-face logo. Lawyers for Nirvana claimed that Marc Jacobs improperly tried to associate itself with the band through the use of the image. Grunge band Nirvana, LVMH-owned fashion label Marc Jacobs and art director Robert Fisher have reportedly settled a lawsuit over the fashion brand’s use of an image that bears a striking resemblance to the band’s iconic smiley face logo.
This puts an end to a long-running dispute over the logo. Nirvana sued Marc Jacobs International in 2018 after the company launched a “Redux Grunge” collection that featured a smiley face that resembled a bit too much the band’s iconic logo, which was first licensed in 1992. Instead of the ‘X’s for eyes, the shirt in question had the letters 'M' and 'J' – with the wobbly smile with a tongue hanging out and word “Heaven” in a similar font to Nirvana’s.
The logo was apparently created by lead singer Kurt Cobain in 1991. Both Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic previously testified that they did not know who made the smiley face – something which Marc Jacobs’ lawyers brought up in a countersuit. In the 2019 claim, the designers stated: “The apparent absence of any living person with first-hand knowledge of the creation of the allegedly copyrighted work in question, coupled with numerous other deficiencies in the 166 Registration that is the basis for Nirvana.
