Dirty Looks
The Barbican’s Dirty Looks exhibition interrogates how dirt has been used in fashion as both a symbol of rebellion and a rumination on the inevitability of decay (image: David Parry).
“What triggered the exhibition was a visit to the graduation show at Central St Martin’s,” says Karen van Godtsenhoven, co-curator of The Barbican’s new exhibition Dirty Looks. “We saw that many young designers, each in their own way, were grappling with these ideas about the passing of time and decay, but also ideas of regeneration and rebirth because they, of course, are coming into a fashion industry and a world at large where ideas of dirt or waste are sort of omnipresent.”
Spanning the late 1970s to the present day, Dirty Looks explores how filth has been used as a symbol to critique the most sinister aspects of the fashion industry. From Kampala-based studio Buzigahill’s designs, which rework secondhand clothes sent from the Global North to Uganda to critique the practice of waste colonialism, to London-based womenswear brand Di Petsa’s stained underwear that proudly references period blood in order to question the censorship of women’s bodies, the supposed dirtiness of each design pales in comparison to the repulsiveness of the systems they critique. Yet the exhibition also explores the inescapability of decay through Yohji Yamamoto’s frayed garments inspired by wabi-sabi, a traditional Japanese philosophy centred on the appreciation of imperfection and impermanence, and Issey Miyake’s pleats with dragon-shaped burns that symbolise life and vitality. This interplay between rebellion and inevitability permeates the show, where the concept of dirt is used as both a rallying cry and a rumination on eternal aspects of life itself.
Hussein Chalayan buried dresses coated in copper filings near the River Thames for his 1993 graduate collection (image: David Parry).
True to its inspiration, the exhibition kicks off with pieces from designer Hussein Chalayan’s 1993 graduate collection from Central St Martins, including a luminous, oxidised green dress that the designer coated in copper filings and buried near the River Thames. Inspired by a story written by Chalayan, in which followers of rationalist philosopher Renée Descartes murdered and buried followers of a fictional feminist philosopher whose work aimed to integrate Eastern philosophy into Western ways of thinking, the collection reflects the exhibition’s exploration of conflicting cultural interpretations of dirt, decay and beauty. Like many of the pieces in the show, Chalayan’s garments are now too delicate to be worn by mannequins, and are instead displayed on hangers floating above vats of dirt. Throughout the exhibition, most of the works are exhibited without the use of vitrines, allowing visitors to appreciate dirt and decay as a material craft that requires time and effort – Chalayan’s mud-caked sequins and chiffon soaked in the shape of petrified wood, for example, were created through careful submersion over the course of months.
Solitude Studios buried their latest collection in a bog and allowed the wetland to dye and partially decompose the garments (image: David Parry).
Chalayan’s use of burial to evoke philosophical themes is echoed in the work of Solitude Studios, one of six up-and-coming practices who were commissioned to create new work for the exhibition. Designers Sophia Martinussen and Jonas Sayed Gammal Bruun buried their latest collection in a bog in Denmark, allowing the wetland to dye and partially decompose the garments before displaying them on mannequins arranged to create a tableau of invisible bodies. Titled After the Orgy, the collection takes its name from the first chapter of philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s book The Transparency of Evil, which argues that modern society has been overwhelmed by the emptiness of consumer culture. “He describes this weightlessness, and this uneasy feeling of being in a world where we engage in stuff that has already been accomplished, and we only make variations of it,” Gammal Bruun says, describing how the duo wanted to visually capture this lack of substance. “We have preserved bog bodies in Denmark, and it is only the body that survives, there’s no clothes left,” he explains. “This became a visualisation of this idea that the modern-day bog body has no body – it is a shell of itself, it exists without weight.”
Elena Velez challenges traditional norms of femininity by presenting dresses that were dirtied during a mud wrestle (image: David Parry).
Throughout the exhibition designers explore filth as a critique of traditional notions of femininity, using dirt and decay to present more devious archetypes. Dilara Fingikoglu’s crinkled black dress, for example, conjures the figure of the witch, while Viktor&Rolf’s gown covered in cobwebs of distressed wool summons the spectre of Miss Havisham. One of the commissioned designers, Elena Velez, filmed a performance of models mud wrestling, dirtying the ruffles and bodices of their cream-coloured gowns to critique the sanitised forms of womanhood typically promoted by the fashion industry. Taking this rebellion even further, Di Petsa displays clothes with stains designed to look like blood, piss, and breastmilk, all of which are proudly reclaimed as symbols of desire and shared humanity. The reality that clothes are worn by bodies which are porous, leaky and clumsy is normally hidden, with fashion archives rarely displaying pieces that have marks of use. The Barbican, meanwhile, questioned this culture of perfectionism by commissioning designer Alice Potts to rescue a mid-20th-century Madame Grès haute couture dress from obscurity by covering its dirt-stained bodice with filtered sweat. The liquid transformed into salt crystals that powder the gown’s chiffon pleats like snow on a mountain ridge, turning the grotesque ornamental.
Models mud-wrestling at Elena Velez’s Spring Summer 2024 show (image: Jonas Gustavsson).
But nowhere is the visceral nature of the body more keenly felt than in the work of artist and couturier Michaela Stark, who creates undergarments which subvert the role of traditional shape wear by highlighting parts of the body that are usually contained or hidden. “My work is usually a bit more joyful,” she says, referring to her images of heart-shaped corsets kneading breasts into asymmetrical shapes. “But over the last year or so, I’ve noticed it has started to take a darker tone.” In the two self-portraits Stark has on display at The Barbican, her body appears pale like a corpse, and her corset strings are made out of rope instead of their usual satin. “There’s been a huge rise in conservative values and fashion is taking that on in order to try and make money, and we’re starting to feel it,” she says. “I think the way women’s bodies are being seen within the fashion world is really shifting to this skinny, white, almost old-fashioned aesthetic.” Stark’s work reclaims aspects of the body which, like dirt itself, are often presented as shameful and obscene, and in doing so demonstrates the extent to which the fashion industry censors and suppresses bodies that do not conform to narrow beauty ideals. Strikingly, her pieces are the only works in the show that aren’t displayed on size zero mannequins, and she is the only designer displaying clothes that carry real bodily stains. Sandwiched between panes of glass like bacteria on a microscope slide, the heels of her stockings are smudged with dirt, her corset is dyed pink from body makeup, and her underwear is marked with discharge.
Helmut Lang’s paint-splattered jeans and SR Studio’s bleached and acid-washed garments illustrate more familiar ways of distressing clothes (image: David Parry).
The tenuous relationship between dirt and authenticity pervades the show. From Helmut Lang’s paint-splattered jeans that adopt the aesthetics of manual labour, to John Galliano’s Dior collection inspired by unhoused people in Paris, the exhibition raises questions around who is allowed to embrace dishevelment, and whether luxury fashion is an appropriate space to hash out the politics of cleanliness. The most impactful pieces in the show go beyond simpler means of distressing clothes and accept the lack of control that real dirt and decay requires – Solitude Studios, for example, lost some of their garments entirely after they were swallowed by the bog, and the underwear Stark has on display naturally split open at the crotch during her photoshoot. By moving away from the pristine, edited version of beauty that the fashion industry typically upholds, and instead embracing the chaos of the natural world and the human body, Dirty Looks’s designers create pieces that are magnetic to behold, evoking the uncontrollable forces that animate our world and ourselves.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown