The Barbican team behind Dirty Looks—curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven with assistant curator Jon Astbury—join Sayori Radda to discuss the politics of decay, regeneration, and fashion’s enduring attraction to imperfection.
The impulse to rip, stain or age our aesthetic surroundings is centuries old. Monarchs once had their palaces painted to mimic the patina of age, creating the illusion of hereditary wealth, while Elizabethan aristocrats sliced open their gowns to reveal the fine fabrics beneath, a technique that would later inspire Vivienne Westwood.
Today, young designers are once again unearthing the dirt behind fashion’s façade, both literal and metaphorical. Through a critical, multidisciplinary lens, they reconsider sustainability, decolonisation and how we relate to what we wear. Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s After the Orgy, where liberation tips into excess, Solitude Studios’ site-specific installation wrestles with that same tension. Using sustainable materials, their garments partially devoured by the bog, embody both visible and symbolic decay, alongside “a parallel question about the decay of meaning in the direction we’re heading as a society.”
Elsewhere, Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto challenged the Global North by reframing wear and erosion through wabi-sabi—the Japanese notion of beauty in imperfection and transience—while Ugandan label BUZIGAHILL subverts Western waste culture, turning fashion’s global circuit of excess back on itself.
Spread across two floors and featuring over seventy designers, Dirty Looks traces fashion’s enduring fascination with dirt, decay and desire. Spanning the work of Westwood, McQueen, Margiela, Solitude Studios, Michaela Stark, Yaz XL and beyond.
SR: Dirty Looks explores fashion’s entanglement with dirt, decay and desire. What does the exhibition set out to uncover and why does this feel urgent now?
KVG: After COVID there was hope for change in the fashion industry in terms of sustainability and creativity, but those changes didn’t happen on a systemic level. That disappointment made us look at fashion’s materiality, its life cycles, its decay, once again.This has long been an artistic motive, especially since the 1990s with designers like Helmut Lang and Alexander McQueen, and today it’s returning in younger designers. We also look back to moments when dirt and decay came to the fore, from Westwood and McLaren’s Nostalgia of Mud in the early 1980s to the 1990s and the present day. Today, younger designers often approach dirt in a holistic, almost spiritual or neo-pagan way. In the 1990s it was about revealing what lay beneath the façade of fashion; now it’s about regeneration and restoration rather than shock. Our wider vision is to present fashion as an interdisciplinary art, less tethered to the traditional industry cycle.
JA: This interest recurs at different historical moments for different reasons, sometimes as a reaction to industrialisation, sometimes to glamour or nihilism. Now it’s re-emerging in response to a sense that things have lost meaning in fashion and across the arts. Younger designers are returning to earlier techniques, even burying clothes again, to reconnect with folkloric, historical or ecological traditions.
SR: British Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan opens with Future Archaeology (1993–2002). What follows are radical experiments by McQueen, Margiela and Galliano, alongside emerging voices. How did you structure the themes without losing the thread between generations?
KVG: We began with anthropologist Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966): dirt as “matter out of place.” We start with dirt from nature—burying, mud-splattered dresses, garments marked by earth. Then comes dirt from the body, there’s sweat, crystallised salt, and blood. Next is dirt from fashion itself: Glittering Debris features up-cycled waste like the “spoon dress,” pieces that read as luxurious but are made from trash or everyday objects. Finally, we meet designers working with the industry’s waste, pioneers of up-cycling and those using discarded fibres from fast-fashion dumps to create new textiles. The notion of “dirt” keeps shifting. We also include three site-specific installations: Chalayan’s Future Archaeology opens the show; Ma Ke’s Mother Earth sits in the centre; and Bubu Ogisi’s commission appears toward the end. Each tackles soil and culture differently—Chalayan’s Cypriot background, Ma Ke’s response to China’s industrialisation, and Ogisi’s merging of bark and plastics as part of Africa’s post-colonial geology.
JA: The layout follows the architecture. Upstairs consist of eight bays—four on each side—narrating different kinds of dirt (natural, bodily, industrial). Downstairs is one open space for new commissions. Upstairs is largely mannequins; downstairs is more immersive, performative and sculptural, where contemporary designers re-engage upstairs’ historic ideas. Michaela Stark and Alice Potts, for instance, explore sweat, fluids and physicality through new materials and technologies. We also included installation and performance, practices beyond capital-F Fashion.
SR: Which designers embody this hybrid approach?
JA: Solitude Studios show work from their recent Copenhagen collection submerged in a bog after the show which was transformed specifically for Dirty Looks and installed on site. Michaela Stark presents pieces sealed in transparent frames, like artefacts, with a photographic series, somewhere between sculpture and fashion. It’s time-based display rather than traditional runway/object.
SR: Is this where desire enters? As a drive toward experimentation and transformation? How does desire manifest throughout the exhibition?
KVG: The title Dirty Looks plays on sexual undertones. In the body-focused sections there are fetish-adjacent elements. Solitude’s bog work is sensual; Michaela Stark’s self-binding is explicitly erotic. More broadly, desire asks what makes decay desirable: McQueen gowns or Galliano for Margiela’s “cardboard” couture, a trench that appears corrugated but is painstakingly hand-pleated linen. Fashion turns dirt and decay into ornament, transforming imperfection into “authenticity” and therefore desirability.
JA: Nostalgia of Mud also signals a longing for a more “real,” unvarnished existence.
SR: Where does “Nostalgia of Mud” come from, and what does this section explore? Westwood and McLaren adopted the phrase, who followed?
JA: It originates with the 19th-century French playwright Émile Augier. It suggests a romantic yearning for the so-called “primitive” or imperfect, for authenticity. That longing returns in the 1930s, again with Westwood in the 1980s, and today. The contexts change (from post-industrial critique to ecological concern) but the impulse remains: to find something real beneath fashion’s surface.
SR: How did this move from bohemian subcultures into high fashion with Nostalgia of Mud?
KVG: Parisian Bohemians appropriated from the margins; that repeats with surrealism, the Beats and later countercultures. With Nostalgia of Mud (1982) Westwood & McLaren put it on the catwalk, combining cultural and class references as an emancipatory critique of bourgeois society. The motivation resonates, even as our understanding of appropriation has shifted.
JA: The roots persist, but the display changes. Appropriation is debated; even workwear and outdoor gear carry class signals. We open with two pairs of Wellington boots because they still signify rural identity.
SR: You rightly frame “primitive” as a problematic term. Could you expand on that within the context of the exhibition?
KVG: In early-1980s Britain, McLaren and Westwood looked to “primitive cultures” they idealised as freer, depicting them as a romantic rebellion against bourgeois conservatism. Now we recognise it as cultural cosplay that aestheticises otherness, their boutique used clay walls and “tribal” tropes that read as naïve or appropriative today.
JA: McLaren claimed our cultural roots lay in “primitive societies,” seeking universals from a Western vantage. We use the term only in quotation marks to show its historical framing, not to endorse it. Many contemporary designers return to folk traditions as recovery, addressing what industrialisation and colonialism erased , and re-open debates around “craft” versus “fashion.”
SR: How is the body explored as a site of desire, transformation or resistance?
KVG: Most clearly in Leaky Bodies. Younger designers such as Elena Velez, Michaela Stark and Alice Potts foreground physicality. The “wet look” appears in Di Petsa’s work; we include Margiela and Galliano exploring similar ideas. There are garments marked by bodily fluids—pee-stained jeans by JordanLuca and Di Petsa, period underwear, sweat-stained tops by Louis-Gabriel Nouchi. We also screen the 1990s documentary Dirty Girls. The “clean girl” aesthetic still exerts control, especially over women’s bodies; these designers resist that sanitisation. Velez’s film Trench reframes her mud-wrestling show around repressed, archaic female archetypes.
SR: Let’s turn to Romantic Ruins. This section reveals a Victorian aesthetic of beauty in decay…
JA: It’s the glamorous gown in ruin, drawing on Victorian taste and 18th-century follies where aristocrats built artificial ruins to convey heritage. In Robert Wun’s work, one dress is veiled with delicate artificial moths, as if being consumed; another is burned. Olivier Theyskens re-uses withered family bedsheets; Giles Deacon scorches a gown.
KVG: Alongside that are McQueen’s Highland Rape torn lace and Viktor & Rolf’s fragmented gown. There’s patina—tea-staining, aged dyeing. Comme des Garçons and McQueen feel antique. The section recalls Victorian literature such as Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham, and fairytales like Cinderella or Snow White, where the ruined dress signals the passage of time. Designers continuously return to that tension between beauty, decay and mortality.
SR: What does Spectres of Dirt address, especially in relation to 19th-century Bohemia?
KVG: Dressing like the “lower” classes—Bohemia. We include John Galliano’s controversial “Homeless Chic” for Dior (2000/01).
JA: Spectres of Dirt and Stains as Ornament explore illusion—trompe-l’œil, prints, surface treatments and artificial distressing. Unlike Nostalgia of Mud or Romantic Ruins, these works perform ruin rather than enact it. High fashion keeps mining this aesthetic, even Acne’s jeans printed with fake wear. The section extends to Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, who reframed wear and erosion through wabi-sabi (beauty in imperfection) which shocked Western audiences.
KVG: The earliest look here is Zandra Rhodes’s Punk Wedding Gown (1977). There’s also a Westwood ensemble referencing Elizabethan “slashing,” where the outer layer was cut to reveal costly fabrics beneath, displaying wealth through destruction.
SR: Dirty Looks doesn’t shy away from ethics. Taking for example Dior’s romanticisation of homelessness, fashion’s fetish for waste. How did you approach these tensions?
KVG: It was important not to dismiss them. Balenciaga’s Totally Destroyed sneakers (2024)—Converse-like and heavily distressed, more or less €1,800—sparked outrage and DIY tutorials. We present these cases and let visitors think critically rather than us prescribing a verdict.
JA: For historical context, not as a justification. Pee-stained jeans caused uproar too, yet deliberate distress is centuries old. Placing contemporary examples in lineage reframes them. On waste, we avoid suggesting up-cycling is “the” fix. We show designers living with excess: Yuima Nakazato (with Epson) on fibre recycling; IAMISIGO returning to natural materials designed to decay; SCOBY-based leathers. Less “solutionism,” more re-thinking.
SR: Which bio/chemical techniques appear across dirt, decay and desire?
JA: Chalayan buries garments with metal filings to oxidise, embracing chance. Solitude Studios use bog submersion, where colours shift, fibres break down, creatures nibble. Piero D’Angelo works with slime mould and lichen; Iván Húngaro García with SCOBY bacterial cellulose as a brewed-leather alternative. Piero’s motto is “Grow Your Own Couture”; Iván calls themself an “haute gardener.” Rick Owens and Sterling Ruby use bleaching and acid washing. The common thread is the creative role of unpredictability.
KVG: And Issey Miyake x Cai Guo-Qiang who display pleated dresses laid out and ignited with gunpowder. Each becomes a unique explosive print. We show the process film.
SR: Does AI or additive manufacturing reveal itself throughout the exhibition?
JA: We do not have AI informed garments. The most tech-forward designer is Yuima Nakazato with Epson (water-minimising dye/fibre extraction) and with Spiber (lab-grown “brewed protein” fibres), placed in the final bays on the industry’s own “dirt.”
SR: How does Dirty Looks invite us to think about fashion’s afterlife and material care?
KVG: Chalayan prompts life-cycle thinking. The buried garments often read as macabre, but they concern afterlife and regeneration. Different burial methods create alchemical, landscape-like surfaces. When I asked if they continue changing, he said he’d love that—but burial can “lock” material, almost conserve it. Elsewhere, Margiela’s painted Tabis and paint-encrusted jacket are meant to flake: the more they decay, the more themselves they become. Across the show, garments resist finitude.
JA: A running thread is which forms of designed wornness we accept or reject. Robert Wun’s Time and Fear are about acknowledging damage and living with it.
SR: Can this discourse around decay, ethics and regeneration change industry practice? Who’s closest to translating ideas into real-world impact?
KVG: We’re not presenting solutions so much as possibilities. IAMISIGO/Bubu Ogisi, Hussein Chalayan, Paolo Carzana shift how we think about materials, process and post-consumption remains. Miguel Adrover is instructive: he refashioned tourist T-shirts and corporate logotypes in the early 2000s and was sued; two decades later, it’s commonplace. Change tends to start at the edges and move inward.
SR: Dirty Looks foregrounds Indigenous and non-Western perspectives. How do these challenge rigid notions from the Global North? What designers from the Global South engage with decolonisation?
KVG: BUZIGAHILL (Bobby Kolade) is key. Return to Sender tackles waste colonialism, fast-fashion dumping in Kenya, Ghana and Chile. Kolade upcycles dumped garments into new assemblages and sells them back to Europe/US, forcing the system to face its asymmetries. Ironically, he must prove provenance to ship “back,” while waste enters with little scrutiny. We also show Priya Ahluwalia’s photography on how dumps displace local dress cultures: LVMH-branded detritus among everyday clothing, reshaping landscape and visual culture.
JA: This loops back to Spectres of Dirt and Stains as Ornament. The crisp white shirt as perfection is culturally specific. Designers drawing on other traditions—including the Japanese—expose that norm as historical, not universal. Many London-based practitioners return to natural, traditional materials rooted in older practices.
KVG: Additionally, our dry-cleaning rails on display throughout the exhibition act as a curatorial nudge: Western “cleanliness” often relies on toxic chemicals, purity that creates dirt elsewhere. Our obsession has consequences.
SR: That’s a clever detail. And Jon, earlier you suggested younger designers aim to escape that double bind—not “clean” through toxicity yet clean through organic processes.
JA: Yes. There’s a desire for authenticity or realness that resists today’s image culture. Solitude Studios is emblematic: “we give this to nature and see what happens,” even if a hole appears. Chalayan did the same in his graduation show. He didn’t know if anything would survive burial. It also changes the wearer’s relationship. Solitude will wash bog-treated pieces for sale, but burial begins a process that continues. You can’t expect dry-clean perfection; it evolves with you. Paolo Carzana argues clothing should be lived with, not preserved as pristine.
SR: Many of the practitioners here move fluidly across a range of disciplines. How do you see this multidisciplinary approach shaping the next generation of designers?
KVG: This generation treats fashion as part of a broader practice, less tethered to the traditional industry cycle. Our wider vision is to present fashion as an interdisciplinary art, in keeping with the Barbican’s history.
SR: Finally, Dirty Looks feels both critical and hopeful. Is it a mourning for fashion’s excesses, or a vision for renewal?
KVG: Both! Early on, colleagues read the title as mourning. It does confront difficult issues. But thanks to young designers, the exhibition is also focused on transformation and regeneration. The “dirt” metaphor points toward change and care. We’re not avoiding the problems but looking for brighter paths ahead.
