Eliana Willis

In 1582, the first Japanese diplomatic mission bound for Europe set off from Nagasaki. Conceived of by Jesuit missionaries, the Tenshō embassy was composed of four young Japanese noblemen who over the course of the decade would meet various kings of Europe and a newly coronated Pope Sixtus V. In 1585, it arrived in Venice to great fanfare and its leader, Mancio Itō, was dressed up in crimson velvet and painted by Domenico Tintoretto.
Striking, playful, and somewhat artificial, it captures a pivotal moment of two world’s encountering one another for a first time. This painting will feature in an exhibition at the British Museum next year that promises to tell the 1,000-year saga of the samurai and explore how their image and myth was created.
Domenico Tintoretto, Ito Mancio (1585). Photo: courtesy Foundation Trivulzio
So much of the samurai story, including the word itself, was reworked long after their power had waned—a myth enriched and confused further by its modern presence in film, manga, and video games. “The samurai dominated Japan’s history for centuries, but the reality of their lives was often quite different from popular understanding,” Rosina Buckland, curator of Japanese collections at the British Museum, said in a statement. “This is the first exhibition to interrogate the myth, right through to the present day.”
A set of samurai armour recently purchased by the British Museum. Photo courtesy British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Spanning armor, woodblock prints, paintings, clothing, ceramics, and contemporary media, “Samurai” will bring together 280 objects, drawing from the both the British Museum’s own venerable collection and a host of U.K. and international lenders. Due to the light-sensitivity of works, many are being shown in the U.K. for the first time. One highlight is a 17th-century suit of armor, which was recently acquired by the British Museum. It’s fitted with an earlier helmet and golden standard of iris-shaped leaves that were designed to make the samurai “identifiable and fearsome.”
Katsushika Hokusai,Minamoto no Tametomo on the Isle of Demons (1811). Photo courtesy of the British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
This suit, in some ways, matches the standard image of the samurai, a warrior class known in Japan as musha or bushi, that gained political dominance in the 1100s from their involvement in protracted conflicts between feudal lords, called daimyo. In the long era of peace that arrived with the Edo period (1603–1868), they served as government workers, scholars, and patrons of the arts. Women formed half of their number, receiving education and holding positions of power. A vivid illustration is a bright red woman’s firefighting jacket and hood which was worn by women who served Edo Castle. It’s woven with anchors and waves, watery motifs that seek protection from fire that was commonplace in the wooden city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo.
By the end of the 19th century, the hereditary status of samurai had been eliminated, in its place the myth of bushidō, a code of honor promoting patriotism and self-sacrifice, emerged. This formed the basis for the archetype so often depicted in modern media, from the films of Akira Kurosawa to video games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, which are showcased in the exhibition.
The show, Buckland added, “will introduce visitors to Japan’s rich cultural history by exploring the samurai’s multiple roles, the ways they represented themselves and have been shown by others.”
“Samurai” is on view at the British Museum, Great Russell St, London, February 3–May 4, 2026. More

A choreographed fleet of more than 600 drones brought some of David Hockney’s best-known paintings to life in the night sky over the city of Bradford, northern England, on November 13.
Thousands gathered in Bradford’s Roberts Park to watch as works such as A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and A Year in Normandie (2021) were created by synchronized LED drones. The spectacle took place as part of celebrations surrounding Bradford’s status as the U.K. city of culture for 2025 and was a grand gesture in honor of the region’s most famous living artist.
The event was orchestrated by Skymagic, a drone light show company based in the nearby city of Leeds, that previously circled choreographed drones above the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, the King’s Coronation Concert in 2023, and Coachella in the same year. The Bradford show marked the first time that drone swarm technology has been used to create a light painting in the U.K. It was also the first time Hockney’s work has been created by drones and also included The Old Guitarist from The Blue Guitar (1976-77), Tennis (1989), and Dog Days.
David Hockney’s Garrowby Hill (1998) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
David Hockney, Garrowby Hill (1998). Photo: courtesy Prudence Cuming Associates Museum of Fine Arts.
You sense Hockey, who was born in the city in 1937 and attended Bradford School of Art, would have appreciated seeing his swimming pools, self-portraits, and beloved dachshunds materialize in the Yorkshire sky. The 88-year-old artist has long championed the use of new technologies beginning with the Polaroid camera and Xerox fax machine in the 1960s, before his experiments with the Quantel Paintbox, an early computer graphics software, in the 1980s.
Recent decades have seen Hockney make work using a host of Apple products, most famously the iPad, with his paintings created on the tablet selling for millions. In 2023, his “Bigger & Closer” opened London’s new immersive venue Lightroom.
“Having embraced the latest digital technology in his work for many years,” Bradford 2025 U.K. City of Culture said in a statement. “This is a homage to Hockney’s lifelong exploration of new mediums, now reimagined in light by Skymagic.”
David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
The drone light show appeared above the village of Saltaire, a Victorian model village comprised of textile mills, public buildings, and workers’ housing from the second half of the 19th century that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. One of these mills, Salts Mill, now houses one of the largest permanent collections of works by Hockney. The building has also appeared in some of the artist’s paintings, including Salts Mill, Saltaire, Yorkshire (1997).
A second night of the drone display, planned for November 14, was cancelled due to bad weather.
David Hockney’s Diner Dog (1994) created by drones. Photo: courtesy Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. More

“This is the story of how I wound up on death row and stayed in that prison for nearly 42 years,” wrote fiber artist Gary Tyler in the prologue to his new memoir, Stitching Freedom, published by Simon and Schuster in October. The book recounts the harrowing experience Tyler went through as a Black teenager living in the recently desegregated South in the early 1970s, when he was falsely convicted in the shooting of a white boy, and Louisiana’s deeply racist court system sent him to the state’s infamous Angola prison. “I went into Angola as an adolescent and emerged as a man. I achieved things others would never have thought a person could accomplish in prison.” 
Among those achievements was learning to quilt, a skill Tyler picked up while working in the prison’s hospice program, where he also built the deep well of empathy and compassion he openly draws from today. Finally released from prison in 2016 at the age of 57, Tyler has dedicated his time to advocating for others who have suffered from injustice, in part through the art he creates. His quilts depict scenes and figures from his life, like the Angola Prison Rodeo, or symbols of freedom and redemption, like butterflies and birds. A selection is now on view in his first gallery show in Los Angeles, “Illuminations from a Captured Soul,” at Official Welcome in MacArthur Park, through December 20. 
Gary Tyler, Fernanda’s Touch (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Ariel Pittman, who opened Official Welcome in May after working at Vielmetter and Various Small Fires, met Tyler through a friend, curator Allison Glenn, who organized his first solo show at Detroit’s Library Street Collective in 2023.
“That was the first time that I heard Gary’s story, and I was just blown away,” Pittman said. Her reaction was not just because of the injustices Tyler faced for most of his adult life, but the way he never allowed them to break his spirit or his resolve to do something positive with his life. “In a way, he arrived in this situation which he never accepted, he never stopped trying to get out of, but he also was able to be present with other people and contribute to a community and make beautiful things… it really inspired me.”
Pittman, who has been involved in her own community outreach following the California wildfires, also remembered hearing a story about a performance Tyler set up during a fundraising event for the organization Safe Place for Youth in Pasadena, where he worked after his release, helping to keep unhoused young people off the street. At that event, Tyler had a performer set up outside the venue dressed as a panhandler, so that patrons would walk past him as they entered. Later on, that same performer joined the fundraiser and revealed that he was a talented musician, singing on stage—and describing how he was treated by the guests. “I was like, this is the most profound, socially engaged institutional critique artwork that I’ve heard of,” Pittman said. 
Gary Tyler, Convict Poker (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Being able to empathize with the plight of others, while not being afraid to call out the prejudices that keep people stuck in straitened circumstances, is what sets Tyler’s work apart. “Not only is he just this wonderful, creative guy, he knows how to call people into this empathetic space,” Pittman said.
On top of that, the quilts he creates are objects that draw on an art historical and social tradition of “finding ways to record and write stories and histories that would be very purposefully erased in our society”—from the narrative quilts created by African American communities during and after slavery, to the work of fellow artists Faith Ringgold and Bisa Butler. His work also allows him to reclaim his own image and story—something he couldn’t do in prison, when he had to rely on lawyers, journalists and activists to speak for him—and those of other incarcerated men and women. “He gives them dignity and light and respect,” Pittman said.
For example, several of his quilts on view at the gallery recreate scenes from the Angola Prison Rodeo, an annual event in which death row inmates take part in dangerous competitions for relatively little money that would allow them some small comforts from the commissary. Others depict prisoners involved in Angola’s drama program dressed as knights for a performance, who seem exhausted from fighting the unfairness of their situation.
Similarly, a limited edition print issued by Official Welcome with the local publisher Ollin Editions, is based on a self-portrait quilt Tyler made from a photo taken of him outside the prison, showing him as a young man in handcuffs, who nonetheless keeps his head held high. The title of the work is Defiant, 1976—the year Tyler was scheduled to be executed, at the age of just 18. That same year, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s death penalty laws were unconstitutional, and Tyler’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. It would take him another four decades to secure his release. 
Gary Tyler, Blackburn – Horse Soldier (2025). Photo courtesy of Official Welcome.
Creating such inspiring imagery out of so much hardship also serves as “a powerful rejoinder” to things like Confederate monuments, which glorify “the worst of our history,” Pittman said. It also raises important questions: “Who writes history, who memorializes things? What do we remember? What do we save?”
“Illuminations from a Captured Soul” is on view at Official Welcome, 672 S La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Los Angeles, California, through December 20, 2025. 
Artist Gary Tyler will be speaking about his book, Stitching Freedom, at the Black Police Precinct and Courthouse Museum in Miami, Florida, December 7, 2025, 1:30–3:00pm. RSVP required. More

Chuck anything into the rarefied light of a white-walled gallery and that “thing” becomes art. This is not a new idea. More than a century on from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), it’s a necessary conceit for anyone entering a space that shows contemporary art. Arguably what has changed over the past 30-odd years is the willingness of collectors to pay gut-curdling sums of money for said objects.
And so enter David Shrigley’s Exhibition of Old Rope, a work that—as described—arranges 10-tons of salvaged rope on the immaculately polished floors of Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. The price? £1 million ($1.3 million).
Over the past year, Shrigley (and presumably a few assistants) have scoured the shoreline and rummaged through rubbish in search of lost, unloved, and generally moribund lengths of old rope. As the aforementioned tonnage suggests, they found quite a lot. There is thick-as-your-arm rope used to moor cruise ships, as well as skinnier cousins that once fixed buoys and lobster pots. There’s old cord taken from climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, and window cleaning companies. Basically, if it was old and no longer properly functional, it was treated, cleaned, and assembled into a rather expensive pile.
Shrigley spent months looking for unwanted lengths of rope. Photo: Lucy North/PA Images via Getty Images.
As the gallery helpfully explains, the U.K. has a storied tradition of rope-making, from the hemp and jute varieties used by fishermen and the Royal Navy, to their synthetic modern analogs. Rope is also difficult to recycle and poses a “major environmental issue.” Is the pile some commentary on Britain’s disappearing manufacturing sector, a wink at its long-lost Imperial power, or else some blunt visual symbolizing the ecological cost of capitalism? Sure, if you want it to be. But it’s first and foremost a joke that plays off the English idiom “money for old rope.” In short, Shrigley is sticking his toe in the murky waters of the art market and testing its temperature.
“The work exists because I’m interested in the value people place on art, and the idiom gave me an excuse to explore that,” Shrigley said in a statement. “I think £1 million is a fair price, partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.”
The adage dates to early 19th-century Britain in which a ship’s old rope had a ready resale value and was an easy way for someone to make a small amount of money. This playful reimagining is typical of an artist who has made his name by pairing bright, simple images with wry captions written in a child-like hand—one he deploys in the neon sign that advertises the show from the gallery’s streetside window.
“Exhibition of Old Rope disrupts the conventions of a commercial gallery,” reads the statement issued by Stephen Friedman. This is not really true. The convention of a gallery is to sell art and this work—put forward by a commercially successful artist who is duly receiving media attention commensurate with that success—will, in all likelihood, sell. Punny and a little bit irreverent, yes, but far from original. More

America hasn’t had a major Etruscan exhibition since 2009, when Dallas’s Meadows Museum hosted “New Light on the Etruscans.” That changes in May 2026, when San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum unveils “The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy,” a sprawling show of 180 Etruscan antiquities from 30 international museums—many of which have never been seen in the United States. The exhibition will culminate 10 years of research and elucidate how this enigmatic Italian civilization shaped the Roman culture immediately after theirs.
Terracotta Caeretan hydria attributed to Eagle Painter (520–510 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The Etruscans are one of Europe’s lesser-known entities. Rome is partly to blame. The Etruscans dominated central Italy throughout the 1st millennium B.C.E., until the formidably unified Romans conquered their comparatively isolated cities one by one throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C.E.—claiming numerous Etruscan innovations as their own along the way.
“They needed to have somebody pleading their cause, especially in America where so many people had not heard of the Etruscans,” Reneé Dreyfus, one of two ancient art curators at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the mastermind behind this show, told me on a video call. “The timing is so right for this exhibition, because many museums now have new Etruscan galleries.”
Bronze balsamarium (perfume jar) in the shape of a female head (late 3rd to early 2nd century B.C.E.) On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Historians also haven’t encountered many written records from the Etruscans. “They wrote plenty, both about themselves and their history,” Dreyfus said. “It was lost because they wrote, primarily, on impermanent material like linen.” That left the Greeks and Romans to tell their story, and “they didn’t always look kindly on the Etruscans,” Dreyfus noted.
The Etruscan language presents another puzzle. Like the Etruscan people, no one knows for sure where it came from. But, in the decade since Dreyfus started working on this exhibition, scholars have grown more adept at translating Etruscan inscriptions—the longest of which will make its U.S. debut at Legion of Honor. Meanwhile, new excavations like those at the spa village of San Casciano dei Bagni continue providing new revelations around Etruscan life.
Bronze appliqué depicting the Sun God Usil (500–475 B.C.E.). On loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Fewer than 10 of the objects in this May’s exhibition will hail from Legion of Honor’s own collection. Dreyfus joined forces with leading Etruscologist Richard Daniel De Puma to source the rest. “We went searching through storage areas in museums to uncover objects that are not currently on view,” she said. “We wanted people, even those who are experts in the field, to know about some of these unknown or little known objects.” She wants the catalog to serve as the new definitive resource.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” will really begin with an extensive treasure trove from the Regolini-Galassi tomb, one of the most luxurious Etruscan burials ever exhumed, courtesy of the Vatican’s Gregorian Etruscan Museum. Sites like these have proven so useful to scholars “because [the Etruscans] included so much in their tombs,” Dreyfus said. These burials weren’t just lavish sendoffs rife with frescoes and terracotta portraits—they were eternal parties.
Bronze funerary vase in the shape of a female head (225–175 B.C.E.) On loan from the Musée du Louvre. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
The exhibition’s crown jewel, however, will be a cache of bronze sculptures recently unearthed from San Casciano dei Bagni. “To have anything from there represents a coup for this museum,” Dreyfus said. Etruscans often left tributes to their gods, which overlapped with the Greek pantheon, while visiting this sacred town. Archaeologists regularly find relics there featuring both Etruscan and Latin inscriptions—concrete proof of Roman-Etruscan coexistence.
The rest of the chronological show will feature thematic sub-sections, highlighting the Etruscan’s evolving beliefs about the afterlife, the exotic goods they imported from the Phoenicians and Greeks, and more. “We’ll have a section on the opulent gold jewelry that’s going to blow people away,” Dreyfus beamed. It will include a drinking cup decorated with 250,000 gold granules, on loan from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Gold-plated silver and gold finger Ring with the Ambush of Achilles (550–500 B.C.E.) On loan from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Legion of Honor
Metal generated most of the Etruscans’ wealth. Their land was rich in iron, copper, and tin. They became master bronzesmiths and exported their raw materials throughout the Mediterranean. But, their contributions to the region go even deeper. “They were the ones who first learned how to cultivate grapevines and produce wines on the peninsula,” Dreyfus said. “The system of counting that we talk about as Roman numerals was Etruscan numerals.” The Etruscans taught the Romans how to drain marshes and play gladiatorial games. They even gave women the right to own property, run businesses, and retain their last names.
“There’s so many things that we want the world to know about the Etruscans that have been secrets they’ve kept for millennia,” Dreyfus said. Now those secrets are coming to light.
“The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy” is on view at Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave, San Francisco, May 2–September 20, 2026. More

Jenny Saville will be subject of a major new show at Venice’s International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro, marking the celebrated British painter’s first major exhibition in La Serenissima. Opening March 28, 2026, it will run through November 22, alongside the illustrious Venice Biennale, the 61st edition of which opens in May.
Featuring around 30 paintings that trace the artist’s career from the 1990s to present, the show follows her critically acclaimed retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this year, which traveled to Fort Worth’s Modern Art Museum and is on view through January 18. The Venice exhibition will include seminal works like Hyphen (1999) and Reverse (2002–13), both of which are on view in Fort Worth and are prime examples of Saville’s superior use of paint and scale to render the human body at once grotesque and tender. Later works echo Baroque masters, like the pietà-like Byzantium (2018).
Jenny Saville, Reverse (2002-2003). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Saville said it’s a “great honor” to show in Venice, “a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life and where the Biennale artists of today sit in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks.”
Widely considered a Modern master of figuration, Saville’s work has recently been in conversation with the Old Masters at Gagosian‘s Art Basel Paris booth, where one of her latest canvases was positioned opposite the 17th-century The Virgin and Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist by Peter Paul Rubens. 
Saville came to fame with the Young British Artists (YBAs) in the early ’90s with her painterly Rubenesque figures that foregrounded flesh in all of its delights and discontents, calling into question society’s expectations of beauty and womanhood. The 1992 painting Propped became the most expensive artwork by a living woman artist to sell at auction when it went for $12.4 million at Sotheby’s London in 2018; she was unseated by Marlene Dumas earlier this year.
Jenny Saville, Byzantium (2018). © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Photo: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of Gagosian.
Her exquisite use of light and color to render the visceralities of the human body are of course what Saville is best known for, a skill that one could argue links her to greats like Titian and Tintoretto of the Venetian School of painting. Indeed, the final room of the Ca’ Pesaro exhibition will present a new series of works created by the artist in homage to the lagoon city.
Ca’ Pesaro is housed in a palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal and showcases 19th- and 20th-century painting and sculpture. It’s one of 11 museums run by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia The upcoming show will be curated by the gallery’s director, Elisabetta Barisoni, and is supported by Gagosian.
“This exhibition marks Jenny Saville’s return to Venice, a city she loves, has visited many times, and is rich in the work of the old Venetian masters that she has studied for many years,” Barisoni said.
Jenny Saville will be on view at Ca’ Pesaro, C. del Tentor, 2076, 30135 Venice, Italy, March 28–November 22, 2026. More

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.”
A piece from Maison Margiela by John Galliano’s Artisanal Spring/Summer line (2024). Photo: © Catwalkpictures.
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 entrance to Nostalgia of Mud (1982–83), the short-lived London boutique by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, featuring a purposely off-putting relief map façade. Photo: Robyn Beech, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood Heritage.
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.
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s “Nostalgia of Mud” Autumn/Winter collection (1983), from the Steven Philip Personal Collection. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
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.”
A runway look from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s “Nostalgia of Mud” Autumn/Winter collection (1982–83). Photo: Robyn Beech, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood Heritage.
“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 Duck Rock 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.”
Hussein Chalayan pieces in an installation view of “Dirty Looks,” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
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.”
A piece from Hussein Chalayan’s “The Tangent Flows” collection (1993). Photo: Ellen Sampson.
“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.”
Dragon: Explosion on Pleats Please Issey Miyake (October 5, 1998), a collaborative performance with the artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, documented in a film on display in “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: Yasuaki Yoshinaga, courtesy of The Miyake Issey Foundation.
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.”
A runway photo of Pleats Please Issey Miyake press presentation (1998), made in collaboration with the artist Cai Guo-Qiang, featured in “Dirty Looks.” Photo: courtesy of The Miyake Issey Foundation.
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.’”
A view from the Comme des Garcons Fall 1984 Ready to Wear Runway Show, by designer Rei Kawakubo. Photo: Michel Maurou/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images.
“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.”
A model wears a creation for Maison Martin Margiela during the Spring/Summer 2006 Ready-to-Wear collection show in Paris, October 7, 2005. Photo: AFP/Pierre Verdy via Getty Images.
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.”
A general view of atmosphere at the Miguel Adrover Fall 2012 fashion show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Teatro Latea in New York City (February 11, 2012). Photo: Brian Ach/Getty Images.
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.”
Miguel Adrover pieces in an installation view of “Dirty Looks” at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, September 25, 2025–January 25, 2026. Photo: © David Parry/ Barbican Art Gallery.
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.

“Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion” is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS, through January 25, 2026. More