Review: “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Is Intentionally Messy

Distressed clothing once carried a jolt to social norms—even in the everyday moment where your mother asked with horror why you were wearing ripped jeans when you could afford denim from whole cloth. “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion” at the Barbican in London (on view through January 25, 2026) examines the signification of dirty as a shorthand for transgressing polished aesthetics, for dismantling impeccable craftsmanship and for grim global consumption habits by way of 60 designers or design houses.

“Dirty Looks”—a most clever title!—is not the first exhibition at the London venue that has looked at fashion as a form of judgment: “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined” was exhibited here in 2017 (Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren as well as Jean Paul Gaultier crossover in both shows). What overlap there may be between dirty and vulgar is not examined here, however, though the idea of dirtiness (as, say, sluttiness, for example) continues to be part of the way women are assessed and dismissed.

Dirt is considered with largesse and subdivided thematically, with heritage designers in the upper galleries and emerging designers in the lower galleries. The show opens with a rather on-the-nose display of dirt-flecked Wellingtons belonging to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth II, respectively. The mise-en-scène thereafter is unfortunately quite disappointing—on the bottom two levels, pale draped sheets serve as an unremarkable backdrop, a missed opportunity to create a dramatic dirt-as-mess effect.

Although parsed in many ways, dirt is perhaps most eyebrow-raising when made synonymous with bodily fluids (this is deemed “the last taboo in fashion” by the wall text). Di Petsa’s underwear with menstrual blood stains or piss-darkened denim or leaking nipples from the My Body is a Labyrinth S/S 2025 collection would very likely create double takes if worn out and about. The biocouture of Alice Potts takes a more subtle approach to bodily residue: she filters human sweat into a solution that blossoms into crystals. Here, the solution is applied to a vintage discolored Madame Grès dress, which has crusted over with a glimmering mineralogy. Stains as errors of sloppiness, like Margiela’s lipstick print-dotted white menswear button-down or nebulous beige splotch on white skirt—which look like genuine accidents—contrast with the more inauthentic-looking faux grease stain on a Moschino tank top emblazoned with Antica Pizzeria.

Dirt is also interpreted as distressed: take a Junya Watanabe weathered denim patchwork dress (S/S 2019) or a Comme des Garçons look (A/W 1982) in which a black knitwear top with a hole is paired with a perforated skirt. The split between Eastern/Western attitudes is illuminated here, the former embracing wabi-sabi philosophies and a refusal to discard something because it no longer looks flawless. A 1993 Viktor and Rolf silhouette is actually shedding tufts and fraying sequins, almost like a pet, its huge skirt layered with a thin, fragile web coming undone. Dirt is also depicted as char, exemplified by an Issey Miyake 1998 Pleats Please white dress sullied with burn marks, created in collaboration with artist Cai Guo-Qiang, or Robert Wun’s singed 2024 yellow silk haute couture look.

Less aesthetic and more symbolic is dirt as the burden of a wasteful industry, of which fashion is one of the top three polluting offenders worldwide; its excesses quite literally end up in the dirt, in landfill. The show posits that some designers (Buzigahill, Miguel Androver, Marine Serre) are trying to remix discarded clothes in interesting ways, but most offerings look exactly like clothes that no one wanted, reconfigured into questionable hybrids. Similarly, there are examples of designers repurposing and recycling objects into the shape of garments, bringing to mind the ‘unusual materials’ challenge from Project Runway, from reused spoons to flattened bottle caps and plastic bags. This results in dubious wearability. Maison Margiela makes an appearance with a vest of broken porcelain (S/S 1989). (In many ways, the show might be subtitled “Margiela,” since so many of the label’s looks involve intentional stains, explicit dishevelment and peculiar materials.)

Dirt, as explored by Hussein Chalayan, is perhaps the most poetic and innovatively ahead of everyone else. In his graduate collection in 1993, “The Tangent Flows,” he featured garments buried for months in his friend’s London backyard, relegating garments to organic matter. There are four encrusted pieces hung here above a rectangle of soil, harmonizing fabric and earth. Twenty years later, contemporary designers engage with the same themes but less impactfully: Solitude Studios’ After the Orgy (2025) uses clothes and accessories immersed in a bog to highlight the unpredictable nature of the design process when it is mediated by Mother Earth and its microorganisms. These browned, rumpled and oxidized components read more like a school science project than a conceptual fashion exercise—what was pioneering 22 years ago is less so now.

The perfect exit music, post-exhibition? “Dirrty” by Christina Aguilera.

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