This article was originally published in Salient Magazine on February 27, 2023. Read it here.

This is my Gunge era. Not to be mistaken for 1990s and early 2000s Grunge and its romanticised grease, nor the era's disco, electric, glimmer rave scene. Gunge is its own realm, writes Salient Magazine’s Francesca Georgia Pietkiewicz. 

Growing up, “gunge” was an ooey-gooey substance, poured over local celebs and specially picked kids on What Now.  

Called “slime” in America, it was shot from a blaster by celebrities like Joe, Nick or Kevin Jonas at the Kids’ Choice Awards. 

Gen Z lives within the greenish gloop-glob and virtual viscosity of gunge. 

Gunge is getting a $20 piercing in your 20s. Gunge is, in a literal sense, the crystallising gunk ball that consumes that same piercing. It’s more of a growth than an infection, but you look cool to your teen successors. That means you’re doing something right. 

Gunge is the smell of nit treatments of my childhood and a flatmate’s friend’s menthol vape. It’s preferring the way you look when an Instagram filter called *:･✧Sickly Twilight Green*:･✧ tints your features and sparkles your skin. It’s not quite Grimes, but it holds hands with cyberculture and then might accidentally embody her essence. It’s wearing ski boots in the sunshine. 

My Gunge is accepting that I’ve always resonated with counter-culture, but never dived that deep. 

 “Trends are responsive to the time they happen within,” Associate Professor of Design at Victoria University Jennifer Whitty said.  

“With every recession, there's a rise in goths, and red lipstick sales go up at times of difficulty. There are ways that we turn to the adorned body to deal with things and cope.”  

I’ve fallen in love with many decades. Growing up, taking pride in being ‘not like the other girlies’ - it was a form of escapism for me. 

It started with the 1950s and poodle-puff-skirts, then went to the late-2000s Zooey Deschanel twee Peter Pan collars. 

It was the 80s for a moment, after hearing Girls On Film and receiving boombox earrings as a gift. It soon evolved into the 60s when I saw Moonrise Kingdom and was Suzy for Halloween. My most beloved generations have remained: the groovy activist flared 1970s, the glittery nostalgia filled 2000s, and the red wine-stained and cigarette-burned poetic 1990s. 

Jennifer was part of the youth movement in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

“I feel like I’m caught in a time machine. Certain types of music and clothes, they’re back. It has gone full circle.” 

I can tell she’s a little confused about why I want to talk about Grunge so much. 

“Back then you would be constantly asked, are you a raver or a rocker? Grunge felt more traditional, more patriarchal. It just did not feel as progressive as the electronic techno rave scene did.”

I’m starting to realise the irony. I’ve been asking Jennifer about Grunge because I’m thinking strictly about Kurt Cobain’s Seattle sound and flannel. 

My Gunge is more like the rave scene. 

“Nirvana themselves were probably the most progressive,” Jennifer said. “The whole rock scene seemed really aggressive and melancholic.”  

Jennifer was more connected to the rave scene. “[The 90s/00s rave culture] was built on [the back of 1970s] disco. It was aligned with inclusion and gay rights. It was a celebration of moving beyond the binary, [an escape from] the white, Western, masculine-dominated world.” Sounds a bit familiar.

Gunge, for me, was realising I was in my early 20s and hadn’t done anything stupid. 

So, I got two tattoos, a nose piercing, and bleached my hair all chunky-like, Avril-style. 

I thought about how to inhabit this world alongside waste, mould, and insects. 

I shifted my perspective to see hope in all things mutant, like Chernobyl and its growing, glorious garden-scape only made possible by human absence. I pondered on nuclear destruction and Ru Paul’s fracking empire while tending to the chemical-blonde burns under my bleached eyebrows.

This Gunge thing I've coined is messy. It’s not afraid to clash with itself. It mirrors the world’s disgusting magpie-esque maximalism. It combats the climate crisis by adding creative new spins to the old. 

“If your garment has a tear, repair it, or do something else to alter it,” Jennifer said.. 

“That's a badge of honour, you've put your creativity into it. You've reclaimed your own agency.” 

All TikTok-era core-culture is just relentlessly recollecting shiny trash. It takes notes of different eras and subcultures and blends them. 

“There's much more acceptance of diversity. [The 90s and 2000s] had it to an extent, but we needed more solidarity. Whereas now, a group of friends can be radically different from each other.” 

I started writing Gunge when I finally stopped limiting myself in fear of what others might think, or what styles worked with my gender, body type or skin tone, and allowed myself to be fluid. 

We all are awkwardly beautiful, and like our struggling planet, our unique differences and changes, sudden or slow, deserve to be loved. 

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