Dirty Looks
Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK
Thursday 25 Sep 2025 — Sunday 25 Jan 2026
A few weeks ago, I went to the Barbican Gallery to see Dirty Looks, an exhibition that invites you to view fashion in a new light. We usually associate fashion with gloss and luxury, yet this show explores the many ways it has embraced “dirty” aesthetics over the past fifty years — from their emergence in the West as symbols of transgression and rebellion to their evolution into radical forms of craft that question global consumption habits and redefine ideas of modernity, beauty, and luxury.
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion traces an ongoing nostalgia for mud — a human desire to reconnect with the earth that manifests in many expressions. Upon entering the exhibition, the first thing you encounter is two pairs of wellies previously owned by Queen Elizabeth II and supermodel Kate Moss. I thought this was a very effective introduction to Britain’s love of “messy” ecological aesthetics — a playful, slightly irreverent counterpoint to the traditional rural idyll.
The show is arranged thematically, with established designers displayed in the upper galleries and emerging designers in the lower ones. In broad terms, “dirt” here has three sources: the designer, the body, and the environment.
Starting in the upper galleries, as recommended, you encounter some of the exhibition’s highlights — Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren among them. First seen on the runway in the 1980s, the aesthetics of mud emerged as a subversive challenge to traditional notions of luxury, class, and refinement. Around the same time, Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto were questioning Western ideals of beauty and perfection, embracing instead aesthetics that expressed transience, patina, and humility — qualities linked to wabi-sabi philosophies.
In 1993, Hussein Chalayan’s influential graduate collection The Tangent Flows featured garments buried with iron filings in a friend’s London backyard. The rusted dresses expanded the notion of garments as living, organic beings which, like humans, are of the earth and return to it in a cycle of ruination and renewal. Their survival is a striking retort to our culture of disposable fashion, exposing the mass-produced, internet-sold side of the industry as incomparably “dirtier” by contrast.
I was particularly inspired by Maison Margiela’s deconstructive designs, Hussein Chalayan’s poetic transformations of garments through burial and exhumation, and by an installation by Chinese designer Ma Ke, who made her Paris Fashion Week debut in 2007 with The Earth, launched under the label Wuyong. The label was a response to what Ma Ke described as a “heartbreaking loss of craft and tradition” in China.
Spanish designer Miguel Adrover’s gown, hand-painted with birds and then caked in Nile mud, stood out for its combination of delicacy and decay. Tarnishing techniques vary between designers, as does the meaning of grime — Westwood’s mud transgresses bourgeois sensibilities, while Kawakubo’s connects more closely to the natural world and traditional dyeing methods.
The section addressing the “dirtiness” of our own bodies and fashion’s waste streams spoke to me least. Yet it completes the circle, showing how contemporary fashion uses dirt, sweat, and stains to question Western beauty ideals while exposing the glossy, mass-produced side of fashion as the truly “dirty” one.
The lower galleries, focused on emerging designers including Paolo Carzana, Alice Potts, Michaela Stark, Solitude Studios, Elena Velez, and Yaz XL, felt to me the most provocative. This new generation revisits ideas of dirt and decay for their symbolic power, using them to visualise renewal, resistance, and more sustainable futures for fashion. Their work reflects the deepening crises of our time — particularly environmental degradation — while imagining a paradise regained through practices rooted in folklore, neo-paganism, and alternative craft traditions such as upcycling, regenerated textiles, and the creative reuse of deadstock.
In summary, I found it fascinating to see how mud and dirt in fashion have evolved — from a rebellious and romantic statement in the 1980s to a more conscious, environmentally aware approach that exposes the glossy side of the industry while redefining ideas of luxury and beauty. If, like me, you’re interested in fashion as a creative force, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this exhibition.
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