Recreating 'Dirty Looks' A Barbican Exhibit
- Abbey Villasis
- Feb 14
- 4 min read
Updated: 21 hours ago
The Standard called it 'a feast for the eyes and the mind,' while The Guardian described it as 'a mucky joy to behold.' Despite its modest-sounding premise, the Dirty Looks exhibition at the Barbican, curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven, is a stunning visual achievement. It is also highly timely. The exhibition's themes closely parallel the arguments in Susan Strasser's Waste and Want, a text featured on the syllabus for KCL's third-year English BA module, Living With Things. For those tracking the intersection of modern sustainability, consumerism, and design, the exhibition serves as a vital, real-world extension of that academic framework. Running from 25 September 2025 to 25 January 2026, the exhibition proved to be something truly special. Discovered via a social media advertisement, it drew visitors to the imposing - and, according to the more chronically online corners of social media, allegedly 'haunted' - Barbican Centre. Given the exhibition's success, and with tickets priced at a modest £15 (cheaper than a London cocktail, if we are being honest), it hardly needed the extra promotion. But for those drawn to fashion, upcycling, soft pastels, or broader reflections on our increasingly digitised world, it was an unmissable event.
The theme of this room centred on the physical body, and on shifting ideas of feminine beauty and ugliness. It featured a clip from a '90s documentary in which American high school students expressed open hostility towards a group of eighth graders who we would now probably describe as 'alt' kids. The documentary played on a television within the space, while mannequins dressed in corresponding looks stood throughout the room, one example shown above.
Dirty Girls,
Directed by Michael Lucid
1996
Excerpts, 05:22 min
The girls in the film were called dirty and accused of not showering. One repeatedly defended herself, insisting that she did shower, but that she simply refused to conform to conventional beauty standards, making an intentional choice to express herself in ways that made her feel comfortable and authentic. Skating culture and adjacent subcultures appealed to her sensibilities. Unknowingly, she was ahead of her time: only a few decades later, young people across the globe would aspire to the very look she embodied, fuelled by growing disillusionment with dominant systems, rigid beauty norms, and class divisions. What is often dismissed as messy or unpolished in this aesthetic is, in fact, quite meaningful. Whether through dyed hair, exaggerated accessories, or assembled layers, there is a reworking of girlhood embedded within it. It borrows from a masculine sort of beauty that is rustic and effortlessly beautiful. Meaning, it is a reimagining of femininity on one's own terms and an attempt to become something superhuman by adorning the parts of our bodies that can be electric orange, neon pink, long or short if we so choose.
Fashion has long been characterised by glamorous and perfect surfaces that will not tolerate any form of 'dirt', defined by anthropologist Mary Douglas as 'matter out of place'. However, over the past fifty years, forms of both real and fake dirt have infiltrated and decorated fashion, symbolising rebelliousness, romanticism and decay as well as concepts of transience, spiritually and regeneration. — Dirty Looks, Exhibition Guide, Barbican
Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, known as Viktor&Rolf, created this voluminous dress as part of their winning collection for the Hyères festival in 1993, based on the idea of 'fragments of clothes'. The silhouette of the dress evokes an archaeological landscape with a heavily distressed wool covered in silver sequins. The collection became definitive of the designers' practice, which straddles fashion and art. (Excerpt taken from Desire and Decay in Fashion, Barbican)
In the photograph above, the look on the left features a dress constructed from metal spoons, while the central figure, positioned slightly off-centre yet facing forward, wears a top composed of blue-stained margarita glasses, delicately linked by silver chains that drape across the mannequin's neck and shoulders.
...Harking back to the 19th century trope of the fashion designer as a Parisian ragpicker, these foraging designers combine an eye for beauty with a spiritual longing to imbue the discarded with a deeper meaning and purpose.
The Barbican took on a quiet, reverent air for the exhibition, as visitors moved from room to room, pausing for several minutes in each space to analyse the collections and decode the messages behind them. Indeed, while exhibition fatigue is a common hurdle for major gallery shows, Dirty Looks managed to hold a tight grip on attention from start to finish. This sustained engagement was driven not only by the natural pull of fashion, but also by the sheer strength of the theme and its sharp connection to contemporary theory. In particular, it was refreshing to see a major institution spotlight the figure of the ragpicker by offering three-dimensional examples of high-fashion upcycling. For instance, pieces like the spoon dress provided a strikingly literal interpretation of what a 'dirty look' can actually mean. The seamless blend of garments and curation created a genuinely atmospheric environment that left a lasting impression, and I hope the Barbican continues to host more brilliant, forward-thinking projects like this in the future.
All Images Courtesy of Author
Written and Edited by
Abbey Villasis, Co-Fashion Editor
Comments