“What happens on tour stays on tour” was the famous dictum of rascally rock stars in more unsavoury times. That’s not the case with Nirvana’s iconic Smiley T-shirt, however, which hit the merch stand in 1992, shortly after the release of the trio’s seminal sophomore album, Nevermind, and has rarely been out of the public conscious since. True, it does stay on tour, pulled out of wardrobes and dusted down for gigs some 25 years after Mr Kurt Cobain took his own life, thereby calling time on the band. But it has also been passed on to a new generation, like a baton for those who don’t quite fit in.

The design was inspired partly by the smiley badge that took hold in the US during the early 1970s, the provenance of which is disputed. Various designers, including one in Nirvana’s hometown of Seattle, claim to have first drawn this beaming yellow logo. Wherever it came from, not long before Nirvana rose to prominence, it was adopted by Messrs Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in their comic-book opus Watchmen and then by the acid house scene, which gave it an ironic sheen and parked it firmly in the counter-cultural sphere.

Legend has it that Nirvana’s more bacchanalian take on the smiley was in turn lifted from the signage of a now defunct Seattle strip bar called The Lusty Lady (tag line “Have an erotic day!”). Another theory suggests it’s a doodle of Mr Axl Rose, sketched by Mr Cobain, which would make sense since Mr Cobain was fond of trolling the Guns N’ Roses frontman. The slogan on the back of the T-shirt, yellow on black in a bold Onyx font – “Flower sniffin, kitty pettin, baby kissin corporate rock whores” – could also be seen as a jibe at Mr Rose’s expense, although it may well have been the band taking ownership of their place on the roster at Geffen Records. Back then, signing to a major label would have you tarnished as a sell-out, especially in notoriously snobbish alternative-music circles.

Mr Cobain would have been 52 this year, which isn’t perhaps as old as it once was in the music industry. His band mate Mr Dave Grohl is still recording and touring with other Nirvana alumni in Foo Fighters. But it is Mr Cobain’s place in the 27 Club (musicians, actors and artists who have died at the age of 27) that has probably cemented this particular T-shirt’s enduring legacy. It’s an instantly recognisable design that captured a moment that should have lasted much longer.

Fashion has always tried to engage with this eternal youth appeal. Indeed, last year, representatives of Nirvana launched a copyright infringement claim against Marc Jacobs, which borrowed the band’s iconography for its Grunge Redux collection. We like to think Mr Cobain would have a more favourable opinion when it comes to Remi Relief’s latest pieces. As Mr Cobain noted in his posthumously published diary, “I use bits and pieces of other personalities to form my own” – something of a motto for this Japanese skater brand.

Also in the latest drop from Remi Relief is a vintage-feel shirt emblazoned with gold suns, or are they flowers in a nod to “In Bloom”, the second track and final single to be drawn from Nevermind? And there’s a soft cotton-jersey hoodie with “Ohio” printed across the front, which is also a song by, er, Mr Neil Young.