Dirty Looks: A Birthday Encounter with Fashion, Decay and Desire
London • From the Journal of Erica Marquez
I spent my birthday at the Barbican in London, visiting Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion. For someone who works with rare vintage and couture, an exhibition about clothes bearing the traces of time felt particularly fitting. Here, beauty could be crumpled, frayed, stained or transformed by the earth itself.
Presented from September 25, 2025, to January 25, 2026, the exhibition examined fashion’s fascination with dirt and decay through the work of established houses and emerging designers. It asked us to reconsider the surfaces we usually associate with luxury: pristine fabric, immaculate finishing and the promise of something untouched.
The installation I photographed brought that question vividly into view.
Clothes suspended between presence and absence
In Solitude Studios’ After the Orgy (2025), commissioned by the Barbican, dressed figures and fragments of bodies hung above a landscape of rumpled pale fabric. Wigs obscured faces; legs extended at improbable angles; shoes seemed to float independently of their wearers. Fine suspension lines remained visible, lending the scene something of a marionette theatre.
My photographs capture ochre and rust tones against cream drapery, wrinkled trousers, distressed layers and an open, net-like textile. Scattered accessories and coins interrupt the fabric below. The scene suggests an abandoned celebration, its participants caught somewhere between movement and collapse.
These are impressions prompted by the staging. The installation’s underlying story reaches much further back.
Danish label Solitude Studios, led by Jonas Sayed Gammal Bruun and Sophia Martinussen, draws on the ancient practice of placing offerings in bogs. Fabric is submerged for months before being made into garments, allowing the bog to colour it and microorganisms to partially consume it. Nature becomes a participant in the design process, with unpredictable results.
For this installation, looks from the studio’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Before the Orgy, became suspended “modern day bog bodies.” Where archaeological bog discoveries preserve a human body, these contemporary figures retain the shell of clothing. Their absent wearers make the garments feel unexpectedly intimate.
The difference between damage and design
Working with archival fashion teaches you to look closely. A distressed surface may be intentional; another alteration may record wear, storage or deterioration. Those distinctions matter when identifying, preserving and describing a garment.
Dirty Looks made them part of a larger conversation. Hussein Chalayan’s buried garments explored transformation through soil and oxidation. Elsewhere, John Galliano’s work for Maison Margiela used elaborate construction and surface techniques to evoke weathering, wetness and the atmosphere of another time. Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2000 couture for Dior also appeared, with the exhibition acknowledging the criticism of its romanticisation of poverty.
The beauty of decay is not an innocent subject. Who creates it, whose experience it references and how it is sold all shape its meaning.
From the Barbican to Galliano’s Zara presentation
Galliano’s new Re{form} Zara collaboration brings the transformation of existing designs into a different setting. Launched on October 1, 2026, it takes archival Zara garments and accessories as starting points, reworking their forms through couture techniques and reproducing the resulting designs in new materials.
Its Paris presentation, staged in a historic residence on Rue des Archives, used an exhibition format to introduce the collection and its creative process. Mannequins, film, sound and spatial staging extended the story beyond a conventional retail display.
That theatrical approach brings me back to the Barbican: clothing presented as characters inhabiting a world. The connection is interpretive, however. The suspended installation in my photographs belongs to Solitude Studios, and I have found no documented evidence that Galliano’s Zara presentation reproduces or directly borrows it.
The more interesting shared question is what transformation can reveal. A garment can be dismantled, reconfigured, weathered or recontextualised—and become newly compelling. Yet the appearance of age and the preservation of an existing garment remain different things.
For me, that is where the exhibition meets the purpose of an archive. Exceptional clothes deserve attention beyond the season in which they first appeared. Their construction, provenance and history give us reasons to keep looking, keep caring for them and, where appropriate, keep wearing them.
On a birthday, an exhibition about time and transformation seemed especially apt. The figures I photographed were suspended in the air, but the questions they raised stayed firmly with me: what do we preserve, what do we discard, and how do we recognise beauty when it no longer looks new?
Because fashion is not merely something we wear.
Fashion is art.
Erica Marquez LLC specializes in haute couture, couture, rare designer vintage and important fashion archives. Private wardrobe and estate collection consultations are available by appointment.
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