Kurt Cobain’s infamous green cardigan that he wore during that iconic MTV Unplugged set quickly sold during a rock ‘n’ roll auction over the weekend — and you’ll never guess how much it went for.
The sweater was a part of Julien’s Auctions two-day Icons & Idols: Rock ‘N’ Roll event held at the Hard Rock Café in Times Square on Thursday, October 24, and Friday, October 25. After going up for auction, the garment went for a whopping $334,000, making it the most expensive sweater ever to be sold at auction.
This marks the second time Julien’s auctioned off this item, selling it back in 2015 for $140,800 to the owner of professional racecar team Forty7 Motorsports, Garrett Kletjian. However, after feeling a pressured responsibility to keep it safe, Kletjian decided to auction it off again.
According to Rolling Stone, it hasn’t been washed since Cobain last wore it, something that is quite visible thanks to a mysterious brown crunchy stain, two cigarette burns and the musty smell.
“It’s very important that we don’t wash it,” Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions told Rolling Stone in earlier this month. “The stains are all there.”
Though he made the item famous during the November 1993 performance on MTV, it wasn’t the last time he wore it. Instead, it was worn during the months leading up to his death in 1994. After he passed, it was given to the family’s nanny, Jackie Farry, who brought it to the auction house in 2014 with the permission of Courtney Love and Frances Bean Cobain.
“There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house to show support and pay their respect to Courtney,” Farry told Rolling Stone. “She was giving a lot of people that knew him things he owned; valuable things like sweaters. I remember she kept going into the bedroom closet and coming out with more. It was around then that she gave me that cardigan.”
The piece of clothing sold alongside one of Cobain’s custom-made Utero Fender Mustang guitar, which went for $340,000.
