‘Dirty Looks’ at the Barbican explores how fashion designers have found beauty in dirt and decay

The 120 objects on display at the Barbican’s latest show are all immaculately out of place. From dresses that have been buried in the banks of the River Thames to a collection of separates that have emerged from a bog, ‘Dirty Looks’ asks us to resee fashion as an interdisciplinary artistic practice. This is not fashion as art, but rather fashion approached with artful thinking.

Its curators, Karen Van Godtsenhoven and Jon Astbury, posit that dirt and decay have been used by designers since the 1970s to antagonise the mass-production cycle of industrial fashion. Titillatingly, they also gather a number of younger makers, offering them a space to crunch and pick at the norms of glassy digital perfection.

‘This show is about fashion as a deeply material practice,’ Astbury says, gesturing to the central gallery walls swagged in raw, unbleached calico. ‘So many of the ways in which it is currently consumed are about image and surface. It's all very glossy and machine-like. This is a reminder of the material craft that goes into all of it.’

The poetic works of Hussein Chalayan were an obvious starting point. Seven looks from the designer’s collections between 1993 and 2002 set the scene for thinking around time, archaeology and transformation. The practice of burial is often associated with Chalayan’s Central Saint Martins graduate collection from 1993, titled ‘The Tangent Flows’, for which the process of interring and exhuming clothes, often with metal filings, was central. It is a technique Chalayan often revisited over a ten-year period, folding it into themes about excavation and travel.

In Astbury’s mind a very early working title for the show was ‘Nostalgia of Mud’, a phrase coined in the 18th century by French playwright Émile Augier. ‘This is a sensibility of being drawn back to a more rural role that Malcolm McLaren and Alexander McQueen referred to as a primitive form of existence. It’s demonstrated through clothing with motifs of wornness or even sometimes just through colour palette and, sometimes, literally muddy landscapes,’ he says.

The design of ‘Dirty Looks’ is captivatingly spare. Throughout, Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck conceptualised the nicks and cracks that counter the smooth perfection of the archetypal white cube. Plinths become gradually more and more destroyed, walls have spidering fissures and hunks of plaster have gone amiss, emulating the laborious nature of tromp l’oeil decay. There are no works attached to the walls, and hardly any screens. The staging is a provocation towards a close reading of the objects on display. ‘It’s about wanting to believe in something again, about really engaging with the material in a way that I think a lot of people feel quite detached from,’ Van Godtsenhoven says.

A floral lace dress from McQueen’s controversial ‘Highland Rape’ collection for A/W 1995 lies in a glass vitrine. It is today too fragile to be mounted to a mannequin due to its DIY materials. It is a fascinating, quiet moment in the show; a brittle object of fashion lore decontextualised from its catwalk photograph and out of sorts.

‘This in-built decay creates a different situation for the conservators too, because oftentimes the garments are extra fragile. Many of the works here could just flake apart. There is a sense with some of the pieces that this is about a kind of archaeology or recapturing,’ Van Godtsenhoven says. ‘With the Chalayan pieces, for example, they are so delicate. The nature of the burial essentially petrifies the cloth, so it becomes incredibly rigid, but also the dirt is dirt. It just brushes off.’

In the lower part of the gallery are six newly commissioned works from young designers. One – by biomaterial specialist and artist Alice Potts – explores the notions of shame and propriety that govern so much of the clothes we are shown, even within the context of an institutional museum exhibition. ‘A number of archives have a large collection of Madam Grès gowns that are never publicly presented because they are stained with wine or sweat – they were worn at parties!’ Van Godtsenhoven explains. ‘The work that Alice is perhaps best known for is with the crystallisation of human sweat; we gave her a Grès gown which she then treated in a solution created by harvesting her own perspiration,’ she says. ‘Her work is as much about the beauty that can be found through materials like this as it is about trying to remove some of the shame around body fluids.’

In the centre of the downstairs galleries, Solitude Studios takes its most recent Copenhagen Fashion Week collection, entitled ‘Before The Orgy’ and reimagines it as a vast orgasmic spectacle of bog-drenched clothes shaped to ghostly forms with scattered heeled shoes, and evening bags hovering mid-air. ‘There’s a philosophical story behind it tied to [sociologist and philosopher] Jean Baudrillard, who talks about the orgy as being a moment of mass consumerist culture, but there's the question of after the orgy; what do we value when we can have everything whenever we want it?’ Astbury says. ‘One thing that unites a lot of these designers is that they don't think about what they do as fashion design just for the selling of clothes.’

Paolo Carzana has created a display of looks from a sequence of three collections that have never been presented together before. Piled up, they form an altar of crinkled cloth in shades of rhubarb, ochre and soil. ‘Paolo’s aesthetic of what you might call decay and dishevelment is not about trying to make something look worn. It springs from ideas of strength and fragility, with a conscious use of natural materials and dyes. It’s incredibly romantic,’ Astbury says.

This band of younger talents is looking for a path of regeneration, Van Godtsenhoven says: ‘They’re seeking a way forward that is not pretending that everything is fine, but they are still seeing a beauty in transformation. There’s this idea of a darker place that we must go through to revitalise the status quo. What we want to stress with these installations is that creativity and new artistic practices can come out of decay.’

‘Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion’ runs from 25 September 2025 – 25 January 2026, barbican.org.uk