Fashion’s Love Affair With Dirt and Decay Takes Center Stage in London

It’s a common adage that fashion comes in cycles, but you might not know that mud is back in vogue. A new London exhibition, “Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion,” dives headfirst into fashion’s flirtation with subverting luxury and not being afraid of a little grime.

Across eras and aesthetics, the exhibition traces how designers have used dirt, distress, and imperfection as acts of defiance—and, paradoxically, as new forms of beauty. “Dirty Looks” is the first fashion-focused show at the Barbican Art Gallery in eight years and runs until January 2026. It is organized by the Brussels-born curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven, who was at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute for five years before joining the Barbican full-time. “I had to really push for the topic. Fashion exhibitions are usually more glamorous, it took a while to convince everyone,” she said. “In a way, it’s also really perfect for the Barbican because it’s a broader art dialogue for fashion and not locking it up in a sort of very fabulous retail display.”

The show isn’t all about complete annihilation—there is still a lot of the old-school variety of beauty. Some garments are sullied just a tad, others are in tatters, some are almost completely disintegrated. Van Godtsenhoven has unearthed more than 60 designers, from powerhouse names like Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela—helmed by its visionary founder Martin Margiela and later by John Galliano—to today’s emerging upstarts. The show traces big moments, like the rise of anti-fashion during the 1980s and newer trends like bogcore and beyond. Wait, what’s bogcore?

“It’s these Scandinavian and Northern European brands doing things like dyeing their garments in the bog,” said Van Godtsenhoven. “It’s sort of a neopagan look, folkloric—the witch being revived in popular culture.”

In various guises, decaying fashion is a phenomenon that keeps cropping up. “This happens especially in times of large social changes,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “In the 1990s, it was this anxiety around the turn of the century, the end of independent fashion, and the global conglomerates moving their way into fashion, as well as ecological crisis and the internet. I think that this obsession, this dealing with waste or dirt or mud, is almost a way of regenerating the field.”

Origins of Mud

All modern designer streams, somehow, seem to flow from Vivienne Westwood. After punk and the provocations of her and Malcolm McLaren’s 1970s boutiques—Sex, Seditionaries, and Let It Rock—the designer turned away from nihilism. The duo opened the short-lived Nostalgia of Mud store in 1982. “It was much more romantic,” Van Godtsenhoven said, “and was also the start of the New Romantic subculture in London that was still rebellious but more playful than punk.” The store’s design made the space look derelict: a mud-colored plaster relief world map covered the storefront window vitrine, and a tarp stretched across the ceiling.

The store’s namesake runway collection was a time-bending romp that is now seen as a definitive moment in fashion. Eschewing the punk nihilism of her 1970s incarnations for romance, it positioned Westwood as a time-traveling cultural magpie and visionary. The designer used visible distressing, fabrics like rough wool and raw sheepskin, seams on the outside of tops, and buccaneer-silhouette trousers paired with 1950s lingerie. The historical references were rife, but the foundation for the civilization she was exploring was that it was built upon decay. You can dress a punk up in a fancy frock, but Westwood was still a punk.

Van Godtsenhoven equates Westwood’s Mud moment to the pastoral movement. “This also relates to Marie Antoinette, who played being a shepherdess in her private palace, the Trianon,” she said. “It’s a longing for getting rid of class hierarchies, literally rolling in the mud, living a rustic life. I would say Malcolm and Vivienne wanted to reconnect with a sort of pastoral life. We have a lot of great pictures of Malcolm in the mountains in New York where they went to live in sort of rural areas. But of course, this is all a bit of a cosplay.”

“This was during the Thatcher years in Britain and just after the punk movement, and you see what we would today call cultural appropriation. This collection uses many influences from different tribal and ethnic dress from around the world. You can watch the video on YouTube—it’s an incredibly long show with very vibrant music from the album by Malcolm McLaren.”

Digging Up Rare Treasures

British designers are well represented in the show, including a holy grail for fashion fiends. “We’ve been so lucky to find the buried Hussein Chalayan garments,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “I thought, let’s try. They’re part of fashion folklore. Almost no one has actually seen them, apart from the few who were at that graduation show.”

For those unfamiliar with the cult designer, the curator explains: “Essentially, Chalayan, a Turkish Cypriot designer, grew up in London and graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art. And while he made sculptures and videos, fashion became part of a larger art practice. He famously buried his graduation collection, ‘The Tangent Flows,’ which was about a female mathematician who was kidnapped and buried by other mathematicians because she was introducing Eastern philosophies into her work. That was the conceptual story behind it.”

“Basically, he buried the garments in his friend’s London backyard for several months with iron and copper filings. So they all had different effects on these dresses, which are still visible today. It’s like a geological landscape of rust, earth, and copper. And then he kept doing that throughout his career. I think in total, there are six collections where he buried garments.”

For all the decades since his graduation show, Chalayan had stored the collection at a friend’s country house in the UK. “This was a challenge for the conservation people because the dresses contain all these mini specks of dirt and copper. This is not what they’re usually dealing with. But that actually applies to the whole show—everything was falling apart or dirty.”

The early experimental work of Alexander McQueen shares that same volatility. “Some McQueen garments were made DIY, like with fishing wire and tape, and then had thrown latex atop and spray paint,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “They were not made to last 30 years or be in a museum. They were not from a luxury fashion house. He was on the edges of the fashion industry at that time.”

A renowned fashion and art collaboration from 1998 is also on display. “One of the loans I’m very proud of is from the Issey Miyake Foundation,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “There’s the whole wabi-sabi philosophy in Japanese arts and crafts that celebrates aging and patina and decay. But there’s a great dress that was a collaboration between Miyake and the artist Cai Guo-Qiang. They basically made a large pattern of a dragon with dresses and sprinkled gunpowder on it and exploded it. All the dresses have a different pattern of burning. For Miyake, the main thing I think is experimenting and using different materials.”

Beauty in Ruin

The early 1980s were a period of flux for Paris runways, as designers like Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier challenged the traditions of the established houses. When Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto arrived on the scene, their thoroughly unorthodox approach caused a sensation—so radical it was dubbed “anti-fashion.” “They had all these fraying garments with holes that were deconstructed,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “They were received by the press in quite a culturally stereotypical way—‘Hiroshima Chic’—and it was called ‘Le Destroy.’”

“But for Kawakubo, the holes were a type of lace and were actually very precious to her. She made the holes by hand; she would unscrew the machine to create these patterns. She saw it as a luxury that knitwear wasn’t fully even,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “Yamamoto was known for his historical perspective and for his ability to imbue garments with the passage of time and also to create very ornamental, empty spaces. The look we have from him was from the wardrobe of Zaha Hadid, because she wore a lot of the Japanese designers.”

Just as Kawakubo and Yamamoto deconstructed luxury in the 1980s, Maison Martin Margiela distilled that spirit during the next decade. “The 90s were the heyday of this new type of beauty that is not pristine and has a lot of edge to it,” Van Godtsenhoven said, mentioning the designer’s 2006 show before he left fashion for good to create fine art. “In Martin’s case, it’s very poetic. For example, this beautiful white gown with pink stains on it. The models were basically wearing ice-cube earrings with pink ink in them. On the catwalk, they melted on the dresses. It was a very beautiful way of capturing time and questioning things like whiteness or what is clean and proper.”

But perhaps no designer embodied dirty beauty quite like Miguel Adrover, the Spanish-born maverick who shook up the New York scene at the turn of the millennium. “An incredible personality,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “He was basically what today would be called an appropriation artist.” In the late 1990s, Adrover transformed Yankees caps and tourist tees into jackets, or turned a discarded Burberry trench found at a flea market into a dress—acts of both rebellion and reinvention. “He was celebrated, but he would also get sued by these brands because he was using their logos,” she added. “These practices have become very normal now, but he was doing it earlier.”

After losing his financial backer, Adrover created “Out of My Mind” in 2012, one of his most haunting collections, assembled from fragments of his own and his family’s archives. “It was very sculptural, very beautiful silhouettes,” Van Godtsenhoven recalled. Adrover eventually retreated to rural Mallorca, where he still lives among his stored collections. His work—stitched together from what others cast off—feels like a natural extension of the show’s fascination with decay and renewal, finding poetry in the worn and the weathered.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com