From top: Shetland Wool Knit Sweater, $480, Prada, 212-334-8888; Wool Crewneck Sweater, $750, Salvatore Ferragamo, 866-337-7242; Crewneck Sweater, $1,040, Marc Jacobs, 212-343-1490; Wool Sweater, $620, Marni, 646-532-6015 Marko Metzinger for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

STRIPE SHOW | A playful Kurt Cobain (center, with his Nirvana bandmates) unknits his brow. Photofest

KURT COBAIN HADN'T been famous long before the world became aware of his penchant for fuzzy, defiantly unpolished sweaters of the thrift-shop variety. It was April, 1992: "Nevermind" had reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart that January and soon-to-be-iconic images of the Nirvana frontman were establishing his close relationship with knitwear. On the cover of Rolling Stone's "New Faces of Rock" issue, he wore his beloved green cardigan over a DIY T-shirt that brattily declared "corporate magazines still suck"; meanwhile, Sassy, the irreverent monthly for brainy teenage girls, captured him smooching Courtney Love in no less than three artfully layered sweaters.

Grandpa's clothes had never looked so cool, or so new. "Grunge style was a reaction against all these horrible things that came before it," said Bill Mullen, the renowned stylist who was fashion director of Details magazine in the early '90s. "It was not this horrible 'A Night at the Roxbury,' overly tanned, muscle-bound, Versace-Miami look. It wasn't tacky hair metal." With grunge, he added, "there was an understanding of the romance of the past, with the notion of things not being perfect."

In what might be called the renaissance of the grunge sweater, this fall knits from Prada, Marc Jacobs and Saint Laurent all express a similar notion. Whether striped, checked or slubbed, there is something familiar and both comfortable and comforting about them—an unslick vulnerability that speaks to grunge's sweet side. And in a way that the anti-fashion Mr. Cobain might even have endorsed (OK, maybe not), there is no prescribed way to wear these sweaters. They look as good with straight-leg jeans and lace-up boots as they do loosely layered over a button-down shirt and under a textured suit.

Though the look is admittedly retro, for Consuelo Castiglioni, founder and creative director of Italian luxury brand Marni, which showcased some of the season's moodiest knits, grunge itself was a throwback to an earlier time. "I was very taken with the dichotomies of the 1970s—convention versus rebellion and classicism versus subversion," she said. "It always amuses me how trends in fashion do tend to come full circle, that the rebellious nature of the '70s had a 'grunge' resurgence in the '90s."

And so things have come full circle again. According to Tom Kalenderian, executive vice president for menswear at Barneys, these sweaters reflect a multilayered nostalgia. "I see two philosophies merging in the designers' minds," he said, "a love of all things vintage and a fear of getting older. Many of the top designers have matured in their roles. True, they design for the younger generation, but they also design to please themselves." And what could be more pleasing than the album you listened to on loop at age 14? The cozy and subversive sweater that went with it.