Kurt Cobain’s Foxes t-shirt, gifted to Patty Schemel, goes to auction
A t-shirt worn by Kurt Cobain during a 1993 Nirvana photoshoot is being sold by former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, with bidding already running well above its pre-sale estimate.
Julien’s Auctions has listed the blue “Foxes” shirt, which references the 1980 teen drama starring Jodie Foster. The auction house had estimated it would fetch between 4,000 and 6,000; the current asking price sits at $8,000.
Cobain wore the shirt on 16 July 1993 for a session with photographer Anton Corbijn, who shot what became one of the band’s most recognisable publicity images – the same portrait that now serves as Nirvana’s Spotify banner. Cobain selected the Foxes tee from a stylist because he liked the film and had watched it with Schemel.
Soon after the shoot, Cobain gave the shirt to Schemel. In a letter included with the listing, she recalled a moment that summer when she arrived at the house Cobain shared with Courtney Love to collect Love for Hole rehearsals.
“He said ‘You should have this,’” Schemel wrote. “It was the blue Foxes shirt.”
Schemel described a friendship built partly on a shared taste in offbeat cinema. “We shared an interest in 1970’s and 1980’s teen angst cult movies,” she wrote. “Kurt had the soundtrack. I loved Jodie Foster who starred in it.”
She added: “I’ve kept the shirt over the years. It’s a very special piece.”
Schemel, who drummed for Hole from 1992 to 98, wrote about her friendship with Cobain in her 2017 memoir Hit So Hard. Her former bandmates Courtney Love and Melissa Auf der Maur recently announced a handful of live shows involving new material, though both have been clear that the dates do not constitute a Hole reunion.
The shirt remains the centrepiece of a wider memorabilia sale. Cobain’s clothing and personal items have become regular fixtures at auction in recent years, often outpacing estimates by significant margins. He holds multiple spots in the top 10 most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, including the 1969 Lake Placid Blue Fender Mustang (used in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video), which sold for $6.9 million as part of the Jim Irsay Collection. In 2020, his MTV Unplugged acoustic sold for $6 million to Rode Microphones founder Peter Freedman.
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