Fashion is synonymous with glitz and glamour, the things I generally detest. I got into it for the dirt; Trent Reznor rolling around in leather and fishnets in the mud at Woodstock, Hussein Chalayan burying his graduate collection with iron filings in a friend’s back yard, Carpe Diem and its arte povera look, Martin Margiela making something out of nothing, what Rick Owens called “glunge” early on in his career. Decaying, distressed, muddy, bloody; life is full of viscera, and I was never the one to look away. The fake squeaky clean lives of the rich that hide their emotional grotesqueness hold little appeal. Oscar Wilde was glamorous, and look where he ended up. At least he was honest when he wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” This is the best we can hope for. This is life, and I prefer fashion that reflects life.
“Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” the new fashion exhibit at the Barbican in London, features over a hundred looks that embrace the filth full on and signals the museum’s return to fashion programming, from which it has taken a multi-year break. Karen Van Godtsenhoven, its new fashion curator, previously worked at the Met’s Costume Institute and at MoMu in Antwerp, and possesses encyclopedic knowledge and an eagle eye. Her expert selection provides an excellent overview of all things that muddy fashion’s waters.
The exhibit takes up two levels and its on-a-budget mise en scene of undulating rolls of muslin does not in the least take away from the disheveled beauty of the clothes. The show begins as it should, with the tableau of the aforementioned Chalayan’s graduate collection “The Tangent Flows,” the one that instantly catapulted him into the ranks of conceptual fashion designers, the one that the then-directional shop Browns put in its windows. It has other gems, like Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Girls ensemble, looks from the first Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto collections that sent shockwaves through the carefully groomed Parisian establishment in the early ‘80s, Margiela’s mundane-made-magical creations, Miguel Adrover’s reworked flea market finds that marked the end of an era when New York City still mattered, and much more.
The exhibit takes an expansive view of what dirt is; there are sections devoted to bodily fluids, capped by Rick Owens’s vomit tees, Helmut Lang’s iconic painter jeans, and the inevitable piss stains, and one poignantly commenting on the garment wastelands in Africa that our unbridled consumerism has produced. Drugs and alcohol are associated with dirt, and so is trash, and Andrew Groves’s magnificent dress from his 1998 “Cocaine Nights” collection, made entirely from razor blades, masterfully combines both.
A new generation of designers is also well represented. I was impressed by Robert Wun’s brilliantly complicated creations, and tableaus from the Chinese designer Ma Ke’s collection “The Earth” and the Japanese designer Yuima Nakazoto’s recent couture show “Dust to Dust.” If I have one gripe with the selection, it’s the inclusion of Elena Velez, considering her cheap, extremely-online provocations and the edgelord company she keeps in Dimes Square. This minor squabble aside, the exhibit is a stellar representation of what fashion can be outside of the confines of haute bourgeois taste that the industry still desperately clings onto. Malcolm McLaren once said, “You must never forget that you have to draw inspiration from the gutter, the most basic material.” He walked the walk, with everything from SEX to Nostalgia of Mud, and so does this show.
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“Dirt Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion”
on view through January 25, 2026 at the Barbican in London.
All images courtesy of the museum.