‘It’s Just Clothes!’: Can Fashion Ever Embrace Grime?

In 1993, Hussein Chalayan covered a silk jerkin in iron filings and buried it in the earth. Mingling with the dirt for six weeks, the garment – along with dresses, trousers and other items – eventually emerged as a decayed, oxidized, rust-stained object, almost impossible to wear and never made available for sale. The jerkin was part of Chalayan’s graduate collection, ‘The Tangent Flows’ (1993), at Central Saint Martins. By burying the clothes, he paradoxically rendered them more alive, liberated from what is conventionally seen as ‘beautiful’. He sought to expose the anxieties we feel about our ageing bodies, showing how the fashions we wear can signal a resistance to control, shame and a sterilized sense of self. 

Chalayan’s jerkin is currently on display at the Barbican Art Gallery in ‘Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion’. The exhibition, curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven with assistant curator Jon Astbury, highlights how culture is fundamentally ill at ease with dirt, while also showing that motifs of decay have long been employed by designers. In our increasingly attenuated digital lives, the faultlessly pristine has become the yardstick by which we measure whether fashion is beautiful or worthy of attention. In our pursuit of aesthetic purity in every aspect of life, the clothes we wear are a shorthand to signal our morality and virtue: if the outside is immaculate, the inside must be, too. We might shiver and retch at human excretions and the less sanitary aspects of the body, yet, the exhibition suggests, our clothes should embrace the figure they coat and the filth of the world around them. Fear of dirt is, in essence, a fear of what is real.

The Barbican exhibition presents many garments that mimic dirt – fake sweat, fake urine, fake wine stains – but rarely anything truly filthy.

The opening frame of the video Dirty Girls (1996) by Michael Lucid, also included in ‘Dirty Looks’, reads: ‘In Spring of 1996, my senior year of high school, I documented a group of 8th grade girls who were notorious for their crass behaviour and allegedly bad hygiene.’ The girls in Lucid’s film are grunge; they are cool. Their peers seem simultaneously revolted and obsessed. Amidst the vitriol thrown at them, a moment of clarity emerges from one of the ‘clean’ girls, who observes that the ‘dirty girls’ have an elastic view of societally decent presentation – that perhaps being clean, appropriate, is a cage made of pressed dresses and blow-dried hair. Many still promote this framework of acceptability, including much of the fashion industry. The Barbican exhibition presents many garments that mimic dirt – fake sweat, fake urine, fake wine stains – but rarely anything truly filthy.

Clothes should suggest or physically articulate the burgeoning feelings whirling in our minds as well as reflect the life we enact when wearing them. The late firebrand designer Alexander McQueen understood this. On the catwalk for his Autumn/Winter 1995 collection, ‘Highland Rape’, models behaved like ferocious, folkloric creatures. In ‘Dirty Looks’ a torn lace dress from the collection, the colour of a verdigris penny, is presented carefully and delicately in a vitrine. McQueen would have ripped that dress out of its glass casing. When he was artistic director at Givenchy, he tore a slit straight up the back of a couture gown in front of his horror-struck atelier colleagues. ‘It’s just clothes!’, he proclaimed – a sentiment we could all do well to adopt. There’s no such thing as good taste, and even abjection can be delicious: for his collection ‘Midtown’ (2000), Miguel Adrover recycled his former neighbour Quentin Crisp’s old mattress into a tailored coat. Crisp had famously written in his 1968 autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant: ‘There is no need to do any housework at all; after the first four years, the dirt doesn’t get any worse.’

There are concerns in institutions around the preservation for posterity of garments like McQueen’s and Adrover’s – yet degradation in fashion proposes a rebuttal to the notion of clothes as museological artefacts. By celebrating filth in a suspended state, perhaps ‘Dirty Looks’ seeks to apprehend the unapprehensible. The clothing we wear can provoke ire, resentment or disgust. Arguably, its potential to thrill emerges precisely from probing at the boundary where the self meets the world. Whether through filth and decay or by expressing our desirous interior lives, the ‘dirty look’ is vital. But the effectively dirty must skate close to the edges of what is considered socially acceptable. It insists that the body exists: it wants, it leaks – it’s alive!

‘Dirty Looks’ is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 25 January 2026 

^{Main image: IAMISIGO, S/S 2024 ‘Shadows’. Courtesy: IAMISIGO; photograph: Fred Odede}