The Barbican in London is to unveil Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, a major new exhibition exploring fashion’s fascination with dirt, decay and imperfection. Opening on 25 September 2025, the show brings together more than 60 designers, from global icons to emerging names, in an ambitious survey of how contemporary fashion has turned wear and tear into a source of rebellion, play and reinvention.
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| Dirty Looks, Installation view, Barbican Art Gallery, 25 Sep 2025 - 25 Jan 2026 Image: © David Parry / Barbican Art Gallery |
Long seen as the antithesis of luxury’s ideals of beauty and glamour, the aesthetics of damage and imperfection have increasingly shaped avant-garde design over the past half-century. Designers have used fraying, staining and decomposition not only as acts of provocation but also as a way to reimagine ornament, materials and sustainability. For some, these practices carry deeper spiritual and cultural significance, drawing on indigenous traditions and alternative understandings of beauty.
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| Designer Hussein Chalayan, Map Reading (detail) 2001 Photograph by Ellen Sampson |
Highlights of Dirty Looks include garments that elevate stains into intricate handcraft, dresses designed to celebrate their own ruination, and pieces created by submerging clothing in peat bogs or transforming fast-fashion waste. Works by Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Maison Margiela will sit alongside bespoke installations by Hussein Chalayan, Ma Ke, Yuima Nakazato and Bubu Ogisi of IAMISIGO. In 1993, Hussein Chalayan’s groundbreaking graduate collection The Tangent Flows featured garments buried with iron filings in a friend’s London backyard. The resulting rusted dresses challenged conventional ideas of clothing, presenting garments as living, organic entities—tied to the earth and subject to cycles of decay and renewal.
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| Dirty Looks, Installation view, Barbican Art Gallery, Thu 25 Sep 2025 - Sun 25 Jan 2026 Image: © David Parry / Barbican Art Gallery |
While distressed clothing no longer shocks in the same way, a new generation of designers continues to explore dirt and decay for their symbolic resonance, using them to imagine renewal, resistance, and alternative futures for fashion. A spotlight is shone on the new wave of designers pushing fashion’s boundaries. London-based talents such as Paolo Carzana, Alice Potts, Michaela Stark, Solitude Studios and Yaz XL are presenting newly commissioned works, joined by international voices including New York’s Elena Velez.
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| Designer Martin Margiela, Menswear SS2005 Photograph by Ellen Sampson |
The Barbican Art Gallery’s spaces will be radically reimagined by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, known for its theatrical approach to fashion and stage design. Drawing from fashion’s obsession with the illusion of wear and decay, the design will create a tension between the smooth, white spaces of the gallery and intentionally ‘destroyed’ surface treatments.
A catalogue published by MACK will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays from leading thinkers including Caroline Evans, Fabio Cleto and Sunny Dolat, with original object photography by Ellen Sampson.
Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: “Dirty Looks signals the Barbican’s bold return to fashion as a vital strand of our visual arts programming – one that recognises fashion not only as a form of artistic expression, but also as a lens through which to examine cultural, environmental and political urgencies. This exhibition brings together a remarkable breadth of global designers who are radically reshaping what fashion can mean and do today. With its focus on decay, renewal and the aesthetics of imperfection, Dirty Looks invites us to reconsider beauty, value and the regenerative power of making in a world in flux.”
A programme of events will run alongside the exhibition, including a “Dirty Weekend” festival across the Barbican and a poetic performance, with further details to follow.
Next time when someone tells you that you look scruffy, point them to Dirty Looks. It would certainly open their eyes.
Designers featured in Dirty Looks include ACNE Studios, Comme des Garçons, Rick Owens, Zandra Rhodes, Issey Miyake, Moschino, Paco Rabanne, Viktor & Rolf and Junya Watanabe, among many others.
Dirty Looks at the Barbican from 25 September 2025 to 25 January 2026.
Photos courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery
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