Posted on
2025-11-24
This ambitious Barbican show reframes filth and decay as creative forces, pushing fashion to confront its own contradictions.
Dirty Looks at the Barbican is fashion’s filthy little confession booth and everyone’s sins are hanging on the walls. This ambitious exhibition brings together over 120 garments from 60 designers all worshipping at the altar of glorious imperfection, to explore how dirt, decay and aesthetics of deformity have shaped and continue to shout back at our mind numbingly mundane societal ideas of beauty, luxury and sustainability. Curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven with assistant curator Jon Astbury, Dirty Looks is as much about philosophy as it is about fashion. Drawing inspiration from anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as “matter out of place,” the exhibition asks “what happens when fashion confronts its own messy truths?”.
Starting off with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s A/W 1983 Nostalgia of Mud, a post punk celebration of rural life and anti consumerist rebellion, followed by Hussein Chalayan’s 1993 CSM graduate collection The Tangent Flows, where garments buried with iron filings were transformed into rust swathed statuettes. From there it spirals, (in a good way), across decades and continents. Alexander McQueen’s gothic romancing, Issey Miyake’s serene anti perfectionisms, sweeping right round to burgeoning trailblazers of the moment like Elena Velez, Michaela Stark and Paolo Carzana.
Spread across twelve immersive rooms designed by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, the whole thing unravels from a stark white fantasy to an intentional unfolding ruin, as the pieces on show begin to theatrically unravel like a fashion show having a nervous breakdown in slow motion. There are fabrics dredged up from ancient bogs, (swamp chic), water submerged metal figures, and garments encrusted with crystallized human sweat. It’s all there to remind you that decay isn’t the finale, it’s part of the cycle, a rebirth on loop. Highlights include Di Petsa’s “Leaky Bodies” garments, wackily marked with menstrual, lactation and Michaela Stark’s sculptural, body distorting pieces that twist flesh, fabric and fantasy into confrontations with the beauty ideals we’re taught to worship. However, Dirty Looks isn’t just about the spectacle. It asks audiences to reconsider what we deem beautiful in a playful yet politically and environmentally urgent way. It’s fashion stripped of its gloss and forced to confront its own mess, and it insists that dirt is neither failure nor shame, it just simply is.
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion is on view at the Barbican, London, from 25th September – 25th January, 2026.
Words – Celeste Aurora Mae
www.barbican.org.uk
