Barbican’s Dirty Looks is the rare exhibition that asks you to question everything you thought you knew about fashion — and then demands that you look again. Far from a standard celebration of glamour, this show honours the dirty, the worn, the stained and the decayed as forms of artistic expression that are politically, environmentally and culturally urgent.
Curated with intellectual boldness, Dirty Looks brings together over 60 designers and more than 120 pieces that trace a lineage from rebellious punk-era provocation to cutting-edge sustainable experimentation. Garments buried in soil, mud-splashed dresses, and works referencing bodily labour are not simply curiosities: they challenge the conventions of museum curation and ask visitors to confront fashion’s deeper entanglements with class, labour, waste and desire.
Designers like Paolo Carzana and Solitude Studios reimagine textiles through natural processes, while historical touchstones from Chalayan to McQueen root the show in fashion’s longstanding flirtation with ruin and rebirth. The experience is as much about ideas as aesthetics — the gallery’s architecture, with fractured surfaces and deliberately “imperfect” display environments, amplifies the show’s thematic edges.
Dirty Looks is not always comfortable. Some works confront bodily fluids, decay and the very notion of glamour. But therein lies its power: it doesn’t ask to be pretty, it insists on being relevant. For SSZee readers with an appetite for edgy cultural discourse and avant-garde fashion, this is an unmissable exhibition that reframes dirt as a language of resistance and regeneration.
Get your tickets now: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/dirty-looks
WRITTEN BY: Nura Arooj
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