At the Barbican, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion confronts every assumption about beauty we bring into a gallery space. This ambitious exhibition reframes the so-called “dirty” side of fashion — from genuine mud-stained garments to pieces intentionally distressed or buried — as a radical vocabulary of resistance and reclamation.
Spread across layered galleries, the exhibition is more than a fashion retrospective: it is a cultural exploration of how imperfection, decay and bodily traces can dismantle Western beauty standards. Early sections upend the pristine museum showcase with trousers crusted in earth and dresses showing visible wear, while later rooms present emerging voices whose work engages with indigenous craft, environmental degradation and queer aesthetics.
Highlights include Hussein Chalayan’s buried garments — clothing ritually interred in soil until they oxidise and transform — which become poetic meditations on time, mortality, and rebirth. Equally striking are the works of designers like Elena Velez and Yaz XL, whose pieces flirt with folklore, ritual and bodily presence in ways that force the viewer to reconsider normative ideas of “clean,” “new” or “luxury”.
Far from being a novelty, Dirty Looks offers a global conversation that spans Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia, showing how designers everywhere are harnessing the political power of the imperfect. For Asian Express readers interested in fashion as a language of identity and resistance, this is one of the most provocative shows of the season — messy, challenging and deeply relevant.
Get your tickets now: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/dirty-looks
WRITTEN BY: Nura Arooj
