Fashion is filthier than ever at the Barbican’s Dirty Looks

Fashion curators usually have their work cut out ensuring that every item of clothing is meticulously pristine. That’s going to be less of an issue for a new exhibition taking place at the Barbican in London: Dirty Looks, which opens tomorrow (September 25), brings together a collection of mucky pieces from more than 60 fashion houses across the globe – covered in mud, piss, blood, rust and the rest of it. Grime, it posits, is a transgressive antithesis to glam.

“Fashion’s frequent association with ideas of perfection and glamour have long seen dirt deployed as a powerfully emotive symbol of resistance and liberation,” says Karen Van Godtsenhoven, who curated the show with Jon Astbury. Dirty Looks neatly follows on from the Barbican’s last fashion exhibition, shown in 2017. Titled The Vulgar, it similarly found beauty in the base, unpicking the allure of the grotesque. And Dirty Looks comes at an ideal time: from JordanLuca’s piss-splattered jeans to Elena Velez’s mud-caked models, stains have become a runway staple of late.

Of course, it’s not a totally fresh phenomenon. As Dirty Looks traces, squalid style first took shape in the 1980s, when Vivienne Westwood experimented with mud motifs and punk began to amp up levels of aesthetic distress. Japan’s finest, from Issey Miyake to Yohji Yamamoto, followed suit with their abstract deconstructions, while Margiela married the dishevelled with the divine. Memorably, in 1993, Hussein Chalayan’s iconic graduate show featured clothing that had been buried in his back garden for six months. (Dirty Looks is, excitingly, set to feature an installation of these garments.)

Some of these once-groundbreaking motifs have become subsumed into the mainstream, meaning that the shock factor has slightly dissipated. “Forms of dirt such as paint splatters have become part of established fashion language,” says Van Godtsenhoven. But a range of burgeoning designers is getting even dirtier. The exhibition includes an ensemble cast of Dazed favourites, including couture contortionist Michaela Stark, sweat jeweller Alice Potts and taxidermy enthusiast Yaz XL. “Dirty clothing is still used to confront taboos and empower its wearers,” says Van Godtsenhoven. In other words, while the high street may be OK with ripped jeans, they’re probably not desperate to put pissy ones on the shelf just yet.

For Van Godtsenhoven, this new wave is also about relinquishing control and subverting beauty standards. “Fashion exists within a world that is increasingly edited, refined and controlled,” she explains, “and ideas of dirt, decay and wornness – often outside of our control – immediately pose a forceful rejection of this.” But it also offers a way into more sustainable craft. “[Dirt] is grounded in ideas of rebirth and regeneration – learning to work with natural systems that may not always behave in ways you can predict or expect, also seen in a resurgence of interest in folk ideas and techniques.”

To bring all this to life, the Barbican has a few tricks up its tattered sleeve, including intentionally destroyed surfaces throughout the gallery space, designed by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck. Even the gift shop will reflect the exhibition theme. “We hope to offer visitors a suitably dirty – but also seasonal – scent to take home and enjoy over the winter holidays,” says Van Godtsenhoven. Expect half of London to smell deliciously rancid over party season.

Dirty Looks is on at the Barbican in London from September 25, 2025-January 25, 2026