A Dirty Look, in a Dirty Mirror
The Barbicans most recent fashion exhibition has closed this January, after hosting over 120 garments, by over 60 designers, from the late 70s onwards in their portrayals of dirt meeting clothing.
Curation of fashion exhibitions in The Barbican is always something special, the space is a bit disjointed but the immersive eye to muddy settings, mannequins with dirty hands and even cracked and flaking paintwork on the floors makes it a more immersive space than I would describe it’s London-fashion-exhibiting rivals the V&A or The Fashion & Textile Museum.
There are many reviews out about the show, from the costume society’s analysis of the shows key questions ‘
‘Why has fashion begun to embrace mess, ruin, decay? And what might that reveal about our obsession with consumption, disposability and luxury? Here dirt becomes a form of critique — a challenge to mass-fashion’s glossy sheen, to sanitised beauty ideals and to the environmental waste embedded in the industry.’
To the Metro and Guardians explanation of the many works and themes it covers around bodily function, decay, imperfection and waste. And even Art Review’s understanding of the works involved to comprehend what the clothing we wear can actually mean.
‘Overriding fashion’s usual preservation impulses in favour of something messier. In doing so, it proposes an ambitious meditation on clothing as something we live in, live through and, occasionally, are outlived by; garments positioned not only as material witnesses to the body, but as physical entities in their own right, subject to the indignities of ageing and capable of great disruptive power.’
Clothing can be art, but clothing is also a very practical part of our evolution - it speaks a language, but it has also always served a purpose. So how did the natural wear and tear of life become so taboo?
The History of The Stain
Before the 19th century a persons white undergarments would be the main layer absorbing sweat and other perspirations from the skin - and this would be fiercely cleaned, however the over garments would collect stains as part of day to day life, and this wouldn’t be a particular concern.
It’s supposedly linked to the evolution of Germ Theory and soap that expectations of visible cleanliness became linked to hygiene. Stains became something shameful and laundry became a strict weekly occurrence. However washing and cleanliness has been important as far back as the Roman Era - and the silent influence that I would imagine overrides ideas about germs, is one of class. Exactly as we can describe so many other trends the idea of your clothing showing you to be a person of leisure could dictate that you must keep your cuffs pristine white, and your clothing unstained. Why - a poor servant will toil and become stained, you are a gentleman and have the means to avoid such work.
A similar fear of the stain arises when we think about their purpose - they have come from some kind of accident, undoubtedly, and where they remain they effectively reveal something the wearer doesn’t want others to know. Perhaps that they are nervous, that they spilt their lunch, that they’re on their period, or that they have a mortal body hidden away under there.
In the absolutely fascinating ‘Forensic Histories of Stained Clothing: The Coppet Murder and the Bolo Poisoning’, Allison Matthews David unpacks exactly what stains reveal about human nature,
‘In the context of these crimes, stains revealed otherwise private and personal narratives around queerness, alcoholism, and homicidal intentions. These cases are detailed illustrations of how stains operate in broader social and judicial contexts, both literally marking shame and stigma, but also serving as a register of class, gender, and vestimentary norms; some that have long since disappeared, as well as some that are still with us.. In crimes involving assault or sexual violence, clothing was a key “material” witness.. In the early twentieth century, Reiss and his team unravelled narratives of violence by painstakingly documenting and interpreting the clothing of victims, suspects, and in one case, a perpetrator. Moral and social imperatives at the time demanded that women cleanse clothing stains because of their associations with shame, disgust, and the abject body. The forensic fascination with exposing the potential meanings of stains led mostly male investigators like Reiss to seek out and reveal vestigial traces of these seepages.’
Taboos are much more likely to develop around the fear of class disruption or the uncovering of the taboo, than around a genuine fear of illness. And there’s a horror to stains that this exhibition didn’t quite dip its toes into.
The Horror of The Stain
The clothing in the exhibition tended to focus on the present day stain, the way that dirt and grime can challenge the conventions of the fashion industry, as well as questioning the living qualities of a garment in decay as it changes through age.
Within horror stains can be symbolic to their wearers past, or future, they are often costumed implications or markers of past violence, trauma, or growing evil. They manifest as physical decay, such as black mold or blood-red, impossible-to-clean stains in psychological thrillers. And emerging from the woodwork as something visible, yet unwanted, they often reveal repressed secrets, as well as being symbols of any moral decay happening in the films or novels they feature in.
In short - natural dirt, human waste materials and bodily fluids, are all items of the abject, they can tell tales of past misadventures, or suggest a future collapse, and transgressing the rules of presentational standards suggests these standards could fall away at any minute.
Hence, fashion, which has evolved into the way we mask our true selves, and present a sanitised version to the world becomes oddly disgusting and fascinating when it suggests it has the power to break down current social structures and meanings.
With this in mind, it does make me think, was there a missed opportunity to layer something darker into the exhibition. With comment on fake pee-stained trousers and fake sweat market tops, Margiela gowns that looked like they’d been build from scrap cardboard and messily spray painted jeans - we enjoyed a thorough exploration of the way that a little bit of dirt, can turn an industry on it’s head we saw a stunning critique of fashion’s obsession with artificiality. But maybe we missed out on something deeper about why we fear the stain. With that being said, when a extremely commercial, well-known and well-funded fashion house sends a falsely dirty garment down the runway - does that context put a limit on how transgressive it can actually be? Is there something about a brand new, perfectly tailored dress with frayed hems, sitting on a straight size model who is sparkelling clean and adorned with perfect makeup, that makes the point - but fails to take it all the way?
The Sale of The Stain
Maybe its the anarchist in me but I would have been obsessed with seeing an item in this collection that actually made the think ‘oh - gross’. Everything was beautiful, in craft and in the delicate new patterns and prints created by their dirt, it did an amazing job in revealing the beauty of human touch. But the human touch isn’t always beautiful, and as we see with these garments a sparkling Robert Wun dress replicating blood splatters gets a great reception in the runway, because it says ‘fashion is too perfect, we can subvert it with a stain’, without actually straying from beauty standards.
See the Prada FW 26 show, whose frayed collars were the talk of the town. The perfect case study for this exhibition the collection included jackets fraying through to different layers, suggesting, in their own words ‘evolution without erasure, new ideas created bearing echoes of a collective anterior’, aesthetically lovely to look at these little details and colours, narratively interesting to think about the stories our clothes tell, but actually - are brand new items of clothing with fake wear on them as they cascade down the runway really being that challenging?
The trend has circled around making dirty subversion acceptable in its own sanitised and commercialised way - ripped jeans, D&G’s distressed boxers, Balenciaga’s pre-distressed trainers - as it does with so many things fashion saw the rising subversion and quickly turned it for a profit - that’s the true dirty side of fashion that the exhibition did leave space for, but could have put on full display.
As per the costume society’s review,
‘There is a dirty side to Fashion….In an age of digital immediacy, algorithmic aesthetics and mass-produced gloss, Dirty Looks offers a gritty and timely reset: a return to materiality, craft and the animacy of garments. It is memorable, challenging and deeply relevant — especially for those willing to look beyond the polished surface and confront fashion’s stains, sediments and shadows.’