Mud, dirt and decay have an honorary place in fashion – metaphor and cipher for the fragility of existence, for lived experience and the entropic cycle of nature. Now the Barbican Art Gallery is staging an ingenious exhibition – Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion – showcasing a bonanza of ripped, torn, stained and burnt designs from a panoply of greats, including Vivienne Westwood, Hussein Chalayan, Miguel Adrover and Alexander McQueen, as well as contemporary innovators, such as Paolo Carzana and couturier Robert Wun.
From romantic gowns that embrace their own ruination and garments that elevate stains into decorative motifs, to clothing submerged in peat bogs or made with fast fashion waste, the exhibition questions ideals of beauty and glamour.
It starts with literal dirt and with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s groundbreaking Nostalgia of Mud collection (AW83), which featured stained and darned Buffalo Girls farmgirl skirts and bra tops. ‘The sensibility is opposite to what the 80s stood for: consumption and excess. In this post-punk era McLaren and Westwood were looking at different histories and cultures to rally against. The energy is vibrant, vitalist,’ says curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven, who was previously at The Met’s Costume Institute working with its head curator Andrew Bolton (2017-20).
Robert Wun, The Yellow Rose, Time, Haute Couture Autumn Winter 2024
The show features a large installation of Hussein Chalayan’s poetic designs, who famously buried his graduate collection in iron filings to observe the process of decay and continued the practice throughout his career. ‘The fabrics became rusty and then green-toned and he kept experimenting to develop fabric treatments. The “landscapes” in these materials are just amazing,’ adds Van Godtsenhoven.
Decay has its own poetry, and the Romantic Ruins section explores that sentiment in the shape of torn and tattered gowns from John Galliano’s Fallen Angels collection (SS86), Alexander McQueen’s slashed tartans from Highland Rape (AW95) and Robert Wun’s ruminations on time, in the shape of a burnt-edge couture ensemble in sunshine-yellow pleats and a grand bell-skirted gown covered in decorative moths. Things get up close and personal in Stains as Ornaments, featuring designs marked with paint drips and lipstick streaks, and Leaky Bodies, which explores the taboos of bodily fluids and features the draped 'wet look' work of emerging London-based Greek designer Elpida Petsa. While Dirty Looks starts with 80s and 90s distresses, it ends with the idea of regeneration embodied in the work of Nigerian designer Bubu Ogisi of IAMISIGO, who preserves ancestral techniques weaving materials including clay-dyed barkcloth.
Van Godtsenhoven is determined to make this new era at the Barbican multidisciplinary, so performances, artworks, video and photography are all interwoven, placing fashion back into the wider cultural sphere. But do scrub your boots before entering.
Piero D’Angelo, Physarum Lab
Hussein Chalayan, The Tangent Flows, 1993
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For the curator of Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, dirt is in the ether: “The catalyst was watching the BA and MA collections at Central Saint Martins and many of these themes were returning in the students’ work linked to larger issues of sustainability,” says Karen Van Godtsenhoven. “It’s the norm now to work with repurposed dead stock and damaged things, but here the treatment was more artistic, exploring plant dyes, different natural processes of decay, through to pagan and folkloric references.”