My view of ‘Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion’ exhibition at The Barbican
My initial review of this exhibition, written on the train home, was a list of things I didn’t like and disappointment at what could have, in my opinion, been done better. I didn’t make enough notes, take enough photos, nor do I have a good enough memory, to come back to it six months later and write a balanced review of the entire contents. Instead, I am looking at what I want from an exhibition and using this one as an example. I worked in museum exhibition development for most of my 20s and I have continued to work as a freelance curator on fashion and textile exhibitions, on and off, alongside my own practice as an artist and textile historian. I have a lot of opinions about exhibitions, about how objects and information are presented and how stories of cloth and clothing are told.
In the very early day of self-employment, I thought fashion-making was my calling. It didn’t take long to realise that historic fashion was my calling and contemporary fashion making absolutely was not. For a time I designed and made fashion accessories but within a few years I shuffled my way into textile art practice and have become firmly implanted in that rich soil. It’s now more than 20 years since I had a full-time job in a museum, although we have continued to cross paths and my creative practice and freelance work will always be inextricably tangled with museums and object stories.
I care about exhibitions a lot, they matter, both as my main route to sharing my own work and my main route to experiencing and understanding the work of other makers. Much as I love books, there is nothing quite like being amongst objects, seeing the real thing, the makers’ hand. My experience of exhibitions is so entangled with my own professional expertise that I can be hypersensitive to nuances and gaps that others simply wouldn’t notice. I cannot review an exhibition simply on the basis of the interestingness of the objects on show. I see under the surface, I have expectations, I crave meaning and clear intentions. Above all, I have feelings about how exhibitions are presented, how stories are told and what is provided to assist visitors in finding their way into the work on show. In museums, this kind of visitor-focussed presentation expertise is called interpretation. It includes the narrative and emphasis of the written text as well as additional ways of understanding the content of the exhibition such as film, hands-on elements, feedback opportunities, additional resources and above all, an understanding of how people might feel within this space and how that experience can be enhanced.
With these hopes and expectations, I am often disappointed. I expected Dirty Looks to have a strong, clear intent, a message about the issues within the fashion industry and how fashion designers are addressing this. In fact, what I took from this exhibition’s interpretation was an unapologetic celebration of high fashion’s love affair with the aesthetics of poverty. I don’t really know what the curators’ intention was with the overall message of the show, but I am pretty sure poverty-chic was not it. The exhibition designers seem to have been inspired by budget exhibitions and degree shows with miles of draped calico covering handrails and benches, and plinths with artificial cracking which just looked like the kind of actually shabby display materials artists and designers are faced with when sharing their work in venues with limited resources. If this was meant ironically or not, it failed.
Design decisions aside, my real frustration of this show was the deeply disappointing lack of ethical message and failure to contextualise the fashion for grubbiness and ‘old’ looking clothing within wider historical and ethical narratives. The ‘Fashion is Dirty’ section simply listed the issues of dirtiness within the industry without tackling any of it head-on. The overall tone was so neutral that it effectively condoned the industry. I don’t think we should be glorifying such a destructive and problematic industry without a lot more hard questions and what better place to open the debate than a busy, public venue? It is not ok in 2026 to focus entirely on design and gloss over everything else. We need leadership and opinion in our big-budget shows. I wish these galleries and museums weren’t so scared of taking a stand. It’s really not that radical to condemn the fashion industry’s excesses whilst also celebrating the innovation, design and ingenuity that exists within it. We can hold both of these truths at once.
I know there are good reasons why institutions don’t attempt to be truly confrontational about issues; it’s hard to get that kind of narrative through layers of management and marketing let alone corporate lawyers, and brings so many publicity challenges, but it is disappointing. This exhibition felt like an attempt to be a tiny bit radical but within the bounds of needing to make money and keep fashion designers happy in their bubble of pretending they aren’t the problem. What designer would lend their work to an exhibition that is going to criticise them? It is understandable but it is not excusable. There are plenty of ways to support the designers while also addressing issues head on. I found no attempts to elicit change, no solutions to the problems. I expect the curators believed that highlighting small, independent designers doing interesting things was doing the work, but I would prefer far more of that and far less showcasing of artificially-aged couture and a far more ethical curatorial voice. I can’t argue that the artificially-aged couture garments can look spectacular and could tell some really interesting stories of history, society, socio-economics and the value of both cloth and labour but those stories really did not come through in the interpretation.
I am cynical about any fashion brand that claims sustainability but the ‘Made from Waste’ section made me furious. Most of it was made from oddments that might look a bit like waste but I was not convinced they actually were waste. Catwalk pieces from plastic junk is doing nothing for the problem, nor is a presentation of ‘sustainable’ clothing which has almost no explanation of the criteria they are using to consider this sustainable at all. It might well be absolutely brilliant in terms of ethics and environment but without those problems being explored properly, the ‘solutions’ appear tokenistic and are presented alongside ‘non sustainable’ couture without comparison or commentary about the role of couture in creating or perpetuating the problems.
The appeal of seeing couture close up, for makers like me, is seeing the hand of the maker, understanding processes, seeing how materials work or change under the application of dye, cutting and stitching manipulation, artificial-ageing and other techniques of transformation like burial or burning. This exhibition was a somewhat incidental showcase for intriguing techniques with stains, dye, wear or dirt but there is no credit, no explanation of how these mostly fake effects have been produced, and above all who by. No makers are credited; they rarely are with couture and this is a massive open goal for this exhibition. The voices of the makers are so often hidden and with a show exploring the dirty business of fashion, surely some recognition of the workers and conditions of production would be instructive, even if only about how couture workshops keep the garments clean where they need to be clean and constrain the ‘dirtying’ to the required level and placement. I would have try loved something from costumiers, or other makers of these clothes explaining how they fake damage and wear, or maybe the science of what happens to different fibres when subjected to treatments and real or artificial ageing.
I was thrilled to see the Hussain Chalayan collection of buried garments at last, having been fascinated by this process for many years. I would have loved to engage with the science of what happened to these garments or to explore the breakdown timescales of different natural and synthetic fibres, and what this says about fashion and it’s future dirtiness. This was not part of the interpretation.
I was blown away by the Alice Potts piece; crystals formed from sweat encrusting a mid 20th century Madame Grès gown. This combination of historic garment and contemporary issue-based making really hits the mark of what is and isn’t dirty in a fashion context.
The installations, commissions and artist-made pieces hugely elevated this show, overall, in my opinion. Designers and makers were allowed to be playful, provocative, challenging and innovative creating a cohesive narrative which simply didn’t exist in the sections dedicated to couture. The reasons behind their making, the meanings they want to convey with what they do was given chance to shine here, while the couture pieces stood pretty silent, as passive beauties to be admired from afar.
This is, of course, the convention for fashion and fashion-led exhibitions. The lack of makers’ voices and wider historical or ethical context is one of the reasons I have fallen out of love with fashion exhibitions in general. This one in particular had so little wider context or interpretation that it was impossible for me not to want to list the ways I would have done this myself.
It is often prohibitively-complicated for a fashion show in an art gallery like this to include historical fashion as comparative pieces, but some element of this would have taken this up a level and positioned the narrative of dirty fashion in its wider historical context. I might have presented some damaged Victorian clothes to explore the history of wearing damaged and dirty clothes; they are plentiful in the prison mugshots I worked with in Criminal Quilts but almost entirely absent in museum collections. Why is that? How did this aesthetic of poverty and distress become fashionable and what does it say about our values?
Let’s have feedback boards where visitors can have their say, express their opinion, select their viewpoint and be part of the wider story explored in this show.
Let’s have some science about what dirt actually does to our clothes, with handling objects and textiles to explore; this show would have been the perfect place for my piece ‘Many Hands’ which was created to demonstrate the impact of repeated dirty hands upon textiles. The exhibition it was within had less than 1% of the visitors of Dirty Looks and the impact was not visible, whereas Dirty Looks was crammed full of people, all in need of some alternative ways to engage than just look and read. A comparison between the agents of damage on historic and modern textiles and the techniques used to artificially-age modern fabrics would have fascinated many. I’ve already mentioned the lack of makers’ voices in couture, but this could be addressed in any number of ways; sketchbooks and behind the scenes photos and videos, independent designers sharing their inspirations and processes, artists illuminating how we find damage and stains intriguing and inspiring.
I want exhibitions to make me feel inspired, challenged, thoughtful, engaged and ready to make changes in my life. This is what they could do. This is not what this one does.
And finally, Miss Havisham was not a widow. The clue is in her name.
I should also add that I visited this exhibition at a point of low energy and there was too much text to stand up and read it all. In my opinion, the text panels needed to be much shorter – there are over 3000 words just in the panels, 16 of them around 200 words each. For this reason, I may not have taken in the full narrative (who can take in 3000 words standing up?) and any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own because of this text-heavy presentation. This again proves my point that this exhibition needed alternative interpretation and ways to engage with the narrative and viewpoints of the curators.
All the exhibition text (without images) is on the Barbican website
My practice is built on my textile history and curatorial background. I work with historic textiles and heritage techniques to explore stories of care and connection. The following paragraph is from my forthcoming book about my work
Tangled; Textile Stories of Care & Connection
My training and work in museums is fundamental to the way I work now. I am fascinated by material culture; the objects we create and the human stories they represent. Museum Studies teaches you how to analyse an object from all angles, to look at many different aspects of it from the source of the raw materials to the sale of the item. This expansive approach to research still shapes my thinking even 30 years on from my Masters Degree. I tend to consider the bigger picture then focus down onto the slightly-hidden stories. I like to explore the unseen angles, the elements otherwise missed and the aspects we find a bit difficult to talk about. I am always interested in new ways of looking and thinking, finding ways to make innovative and original work in a crowded world of textile artists inspired by heritage and memory. In my work I aim to explore and illuminate narratives about people, places and objects, and how we respond to and interact with things, tools, materials and the traces and stories we leave behind.
Tangled will be self-published in August 2026 and will be available to pre-order very soon. Join my mailing list to keep up to date and see more of my work at ruthsinger.com
This post also appears on my Substack where I share some of my writing. You can join me there, but I also hope you will join my email list (below) to hear about everything that I am doing, courses, workshops, exhibitions and sewing.
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