Dirty Looks: Fashion Finds Beauty in the Mud at the Barbican
At first glance, dirt seems like fashion’s enemy—something brushed away before stepping into the studio. Yet Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, open now at the Barbican Art Gallery until 25 January 2026, invites us to reconsider. This bold exhibition proposes that decay is not the end of beauty but the beginning of transformation. Through over a hundred garments and installations from more than 60 designers, it explores how fashion has embraced the raw, the weathered, and the imperfect as expressions of rebellion, resilience, and renewal.
The exhibition traces its roots to the anti-establishment currents of the 1980s, where designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren challenged elitist ideas of luxury, turning rips, stains, and scuffs into statements of social defiance. In parallel, visionaries of the avant-garde, namely Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto, introduced aesthetics shaped by wabi-sabi philosophy, honouring impermanence and patina over gloss and precision.
Hussein Chalayan, The Tangent Flows, 1993. Photograph by Ellen Sampson.
A pivotal moment in this journey is Hussein Chalayan’s The Tangent Flows (1993), where garments were buried in a friend’s London garden alongside iron filings. Unearthed months later, stained by rust and earth, their altered forms embodied a poetic cycle of creation, decay, and rebirth, something that Chalayan would later call “future archaeology”...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Paolo Carzana, Autumn/Winter 2025, Dragons Unwinged at the Butchers Block. Photograph by Joseph Rigby. Courtesy of Paolo Carzana.
All further images as credited in photo captions.