There are some fashion exhibition greats that live in my mind rent free. The 2015 Savage Beauty exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s life work at the V&A. Camp at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion at the Barbican is about to occupy the same mental real estate. It’s a mark of a truly great show when you want to immediately return, or simply never leave. If I could bunk down between the mannequins and stay the night I would.
Dirty Looks is a feast for the eyes and the mind. Curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven (who co-authored the exhibition catalog for Camp, incidentally), and assistant curator Jon Astbury (full disclosure, they’re a former colleague) have covered an impressive array of thought-provoking themes that you can linger with, or simply absorb by osmosis as you wonder at the archive pulls.
Spotting particular pieces gives a fashion obsessive the same high I imagine twitchers get from spotting a rare crested loon. The Wine Stain gown from Robert Wun’s SS23 collection, including gloves dripping blood-red Swarovski crystals? Bury me in it. My dream wedding dress from Di Petsa’s 2021 Wet Brides collection? Frisk me on the way out. Seeing good chunks of a single collection displayed together, or in conversation with pieces made decades apart, adds to the thrill.
All kinds of muckiness has a place here, from the dirt and decay endemic to nature and entropy, sex and death, to the messiness of being human and humanity’s many messes. There’s the opening display of Hussein Chalayan’s groundbreaking (literally) 1993 graduate collection where he exhumed dress he buried with iron filings in London soil. Fashion’s greatest tributes to Miss Havisham and her ratty gown, including a piece from McQueen’s divisive Highland Rape AW95 show. Foraged trash turned into treasures, including Andrew Groves bonkers SS99 showcloser for Cocaine Nights: a dress made out of razor blades from a collection inspired by Face/Off. Pizza and pit stains, dirt-soaked hems, and clothes that have been torn, buried, soaked, set on fire or even exploded — as with Issey Miyake’s 1998 project Dragon: Explosion.
It’s almost too much to take in, but there’s space to linger and enjoy each piece. The Barbican Art Gallery has been loosely divided into two levels, with most of the big established designers displayed upstairs and the emerging designers downstairs. These new kids on the block have some of the most gorgeous and confronting pieces, from Michaela Stark’s body-morphing corsetry and undergarments still stained with discharge to Solitude Studio’s spooky-freaky After the Orgy, where clothes marinaded in a peat bog are suspended in writhing forms.
Something being unclean is such a powerful taboo that to embrace it by wearing it against your skin is to step outside societal norms. Dirty Looks explores gender and class, asking why certain groups might deliberately scruff up their clothes to look cool, or ways women can reject beauty norms by refusing to tidy away their slovenliness and secretions. It’s a powerful retort to the scourge of the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic and beige upon beige that has been mainstreamed in fashion recently, skewering the idea that pristine and disposable newness is something aspirational.
Exhibition design by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck is perfectly pitched, with billowing sheets softening the straight lines of the space and deliberate scuffing with cracks visible in the pedestals and tiles missing from the walls. This show could only be staged in the Barbican, a gorgeous hulk of Sixties Brutalist concrete beloved by design nerds yet part of a national debate about the decay of these kinds of estates. There is beauty in weathering of the manmade, something this exhibition not so much celebrates as rolls around in the dirt with it .
If I could have one critique it would be to have Dirty Looks as a multi-sensory experience. Obviously you can’t touch the garments, but fragments of cloth treated as the main garment was, or different boxes of dirt you could actually handle would have added to the atmosphere (and made it more accessible to partially sighted attendees). I also wanted to be able to smell the garments — Alice Potts used her own sweat to create bio-crystals to adorn her piece, Perspire Madame Grès: Biocouture, making me want to take a good whiff. There are so many exciting perfume artists working with scents of mud, decay and dirt that it feels like an omission not to have a fragrance display. Bat by Zoologist, Coven by Andrea Maach, Dirt by Demeter, Dark Ride by Xyrena and, of course, the ur-stank fragrance Secretions Magnifique by Etat Libre d’Orange. But I’m a freak like that.
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion at the Barbican Art Gallery, until 25 January 2026, barbican.org.uk
