Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion maps the ways fashion designers have turned dirt, waste, and material deterioration into a sustained critique of luxury, taste, and the industry's own environmental and ethical contradictions.
About This Book
Fashion has long policed cleanliness as a proxy for value — this anthology dismantles that convention with precision. Published to accompany a Barbican exhibition, Dirty Looks brings together new critical essays and an extensive photographic portfolio to examine how designers from Vivienne Westwood to Maison Margiela have weaponised stains, decomposition, and waste as tools of rebellion and reinvention. In a fashion landscape shaped by climate emergency, labour injustice, and accelerating material waste, the works presented here are not provocations for their own sake — they propose new frameworks for what fashion might value and how it might make. The book spans decolonial critique, feminist resistance, and the tension between bodily intimacy and public display.
Key Features
- 224 pages of critical essays and forensic fashion photography
- Essays by Caroline Evans, Akiko Fukai, Lou Stoppard, and Sara Arnold
- Photography portfolio by Ellen Sampson documenting key garments
- Featured designers include Vivienne Westwood, Hussein Chalayan, Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Alexander McQueen, and Maison Margiela
- Published by SPBH Editions & Barbican
What You'll Discover
- How organic and man-made dirt has become a material for innovation — from garments submerged in bogs to clothing made from fashion waste
- The ideological work performed by notions of cleanliness and taste, and how designers have systematically undermined them
- Decolonial and feminist readings of fashion's relationship to the body, labour, and material culture
- Ellen Sampson's photographic methodology for capturing deterioration, wornness, and material transformation as formal qualities rather than flaws
About the Author
Jon Astbury and Karen Van Godtsenhoven are the editors of this anthology. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 224
- Dimensions: 17 x 23.5cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781917651127
- Publisher: SPBH Editions & Barbican
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Fashion designers, cultural theorists, and researchers working at the intersection of sustainability, material culture, and critical fashion studies — as well as practitioners interested in how waste and deterioration are being reframed as design strategies.