After six years of legal fights, Nirvana and Marc Jacobs are settling a dispute over a smiley-face logo. Nirvana’s lawyers said Jacobs wrongly used the image to link itself with the band.
Jacobs and art director Robert Fisher have settled a lawsuit about a smiley face image that looked too much like Nirvana’s famous logo. The dispute started in 2018 when Nirvana sued Marc for using a similar smiley face in their ‘Redux Grunge’ collection.
Statements About The Lawsuit
Instead of ‘X’s for eyes, the shirt had ‘M’ and ‘J’ as eyes. It also had a wobbly smile with a tongue and the word ‘Heaven’ in a font like Nirvana’s. The logo was supposedly made by Kurt Cobain in 1991. Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic said they didn’t know who created it, which Jacobs’ lawyers used in their countersuit. In the 2019 claim, the designers said:
“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’s infringement claim are the basis for the counterclaim asserted.”
The band’s lawyers further stated:
“[The fashion brand’s] use of Nirvana’s copyrighted image on and to promote its products is intentional, and is part and parcel of a wider campaign to associate the entire ‘Bootleg Redux Grunge’ collection with Nirvana, one of the founders of the ‘Grunge’ musical genre, so as to make the ‘Grunge’ association with the collection more authentic.”
In 2020, Robert Fisher, a former art director, claimed he designed the logo for Nirvana in the 1990s. In 2023, a judge said that if Fisher had made the logo, it would belong to Geffen Records, not Fisher. The judge didn’t decide if Cobain or Fisher created it.
This week, the parties agreed to a settlement proposed by a mediator. The details of the agreement were not shared in court, and they have 21 days to finalize it.