Dirty Looks Review. Mud, sweat and tears – can dirt be beautiful?
November 20, 2025Dirty Looks Review. Dramatically presented and thoughtful survey of clothes that are dirty in different philosophical ways.
The catchy title for Vivienne Westwood’s 1984 catwalk show, “Nostalgia of Mud”, is not her own. It was coined in1855 by Émile Augier. I was impressed by her erudition (and somewhat by her cheekiness), until I realised it had already been reused in a 1970 Tom Wolfe essay. Though it’s a good title, begging not to sink into obscurity. “Nostalgia of Mud”, the original text, is about people’s desire, in this newly industrial age, to get back to the land. About how things were better in the pastoral life of a generation ago, or so people would say, forgetting, perhaps, how backbreaking farming work could be, albeit with the advantage of getting a bit of sunlight and being more in touch with the seasons.
Getting Down and Dirty
Image G Jones/The Barbican
Image G Jones/The Barbican
Image G Jones/The Barbican
Image G Jones/The Barbican
Image G Jones/The Barbican
Today it is no different. Giving yourself up to getting really, really dirty can be freeing. Not worrying about damaging your clothes. Paddling in the muck. Wiping your mouth on your sleeve, trailing your overlong skirts on the floor so that even when you’re not progressing down a mud track you leave a trail wherever you go, either swirling up the dust on a dry day or soaking up every puddle you pass and redistributing your accumulated filth to dryer surroundings. People love going to a mud soaked festival for this reason, and truly abandoning themselves to the music and dancing and physical sensations. It is a more extreme version of going for a nice walk in the park to soak up some nature.
Dirty Looks Review – Concept-Driven
Fashion designers find the concept alluring too. Far from the white coated petit mains (seamstresses) that created pristine couture in the 1950s, seemingly unsullied by any human hands, even while being “hand made” was a must, in the 80s and 90s designers like Vivienne Westwood and Hussein Chalayan challenged that idea, creating strongly concept driven collections.
Although we have probably all grasped that Hussein Chalayan buried his first collection, the exact reason why was not that clear to me, apart from to see the change wrought by decay. In fact he based it on one of his own stories. I can’t find the story itself, but the precís sounds interesting: the followers of a female philosopher who seeks to reconcile Eastern and Cartesian philosophy wear shimmering, magnetised dresses in a dance performance. The followers of René Descartes fling iron filings at the women, and later murder then bury them. Chalayan’s dresses were buried in a friend’s garden along with metal filings.
The dresses turned green, verdigris having crept into the copper elements on the clothing in an alchemical twist. I have seen many artists and craftspeople add metal filings to their work in experimentation, hoping for interesting transformations. These include potters, who posit that the metal will melt and produce a new effect. I also know painters who bury their work, leave the canvases out in winter (the frost does create great patterns) and also, of course, like Andy Warhol, piss on it. So in art, playing with dirt and disgust is not at all new. If you think about it, pure pigment is a form of dirt or dust, as it formed of minerals. At the moment, bio art is very popular, including pieces where artists deliberately introduce bacteria to a prepared ground to see what it will do.
Nostalgia of Mud
Dirty Looks Review. As to Westwood’s “Nostalgia of Mud” collection, these are definitely art and not fashion, as are most of the pieces in the show. Some could be called costume. I think Vivienne Westwood would have been super happy as a costume designer, where I think there is quite a lot more leeway. Some of her shops were definitely more like stage sets in appearance. However, I suppose that it was more shocking to present her clothing as fashion and the best costume designers I know, even the ones showered with Oscars, are not household names like Vivienne.
I am not a big fan of bacteria and body fluids. There are pieces here that I avert my eyes from and hurry pass, notably Michaela Stark’s. Her photos of her own body, swathes of fat and flesh bound by cords and compressed into tiny corsets, look fetishistic. The sweat soaked garments themselves are displayed nearby.
An intricately pleated Madame Gres gown soaked in the purified sweat of Alice Potts and her friends is less raw. The process resulted in saltwater which, with the silk dress as a substrate, grew beautiful white crystals. The gown, by the way, was already irrevocably grubby with age and so the treatment didn’t ruin a classic piece. I wondered why the sweat had been purified as the impurities would have created different effects. But I suppose that there is more a story behind the than the brief label. Certainly the white crystals look pretty. I actually misremembered the piece and thought it was tears, not sweat. Pure tears sound like a fairytale.
Dirty Looks Review – Dramatic Presentation
The exhibition presentation is wonderful. Huge swoops of backdrop cloth are pinned to the walls in ways that look deliberately unfinished. Paint cracks off the platforms the mannequins stand on. Some of the display sections are tiled like a public bathroom, either because they are inherently dirty places or perhaps to point up that they are clean places, in opposition to these clothes. The lighting is dramatic and provides plenty of impressive shadows, both picking out the backdrop and casting shadow silhouettes of more complex clothing constructions. Individual groupings and themes are given plenty of room to breathe and harmonise from different angles.
My only criticism is that I think the scope is too wide, and they could have cut a few displays. I can see the connection between decomposition and recycling, but did we have to go there? It’s interesting enough that many designers just thought about it in a purely artistic sense. It felt, to me, like a film that you think has ended on a satisfying scene but then goes on and on. You look into all the upstairs displays, go downstairs into the main space, absorb all that theatricality. Then go round the corner and oops, another three or so little rooms. Perhaps I should have gone for a coffee break and come back to consider them. An intermission. However, it’s overall a great show and not to be missed.
