The Barbican Art Gallery has unveiled Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion, its first major fashion exhibition in eight years, featuring close to 100 Bonaveri mannequins painted in distinctive grey tones. Running until 25 January 2026, the exhibition brings together 120 works by over 60 designers to explore fashion's rebellious embrace of dirt, decay and imperfection.
A Return to Fashion at the Barbican
The Barbican has a distinguished history of groundbreaking fashion exhibitions, from The House of Viktor & Rolf (2008) to The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier (2014) and The Vulgar (2017). With Dirty Looks, the gallery signals the beginning of a new era of fashion programming, and Bonaveri's Tribe collection plays a central role in bringing this provocative vision to life.
The exhibition features works from fashion icons including Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Maison Margiela and Issey Miyake, alongside emerging designers such as Elena Velez, Yuima Nakazato and IAMISIGO. The curators, Karen Van Godtsenhoven and Jon Astbury, deliberately moved away from traditional dramatic mannequin posing, opting instead for more subdued stances that complement the contemplative nature of the exhibition.
Tribe: The Perfect Canvas for Conceptual Fashion
The Tribe collection, released by Bonaveri in 2017, was designed to adapt to a diversity of styles – making it ideally suited to an exhibition that spans decades of fashion experimentation. With its androgynous faces and characteristic poses representing modern youth culture, Tribe mannequins provide a neutral yet evocative presence that allows the garments to speak for themselves.
The collection comprises five standing female poses, four standing male poses, and two seated variations for both male and female figures. This versatility proved essential for Dirty Looks, where garments range from romantic evening gowns celebrating their own ruination to clothing submerged in peat bogs and pieces created from transformed fast fashion waste. A number of bespoke pieces were created for the exhibition where a bespoke narrative called for specific pose alterations.
"As much as you want mannequins to fade into the background because the focus is the clothes, you can't ignore the fact that you have close to 100 grey bodies in the space," noted assistant curator Jon Astbury. The deliberate choice of neutral grey tones for the Tribe mannequins creates a cohesive visual language throughout the gallery, allowing visitors to focus on the textures, forms and narratives embedded in each garment.
Exploring Fashion's Relationship with Dirt
Dirty Looks takes its conceptual foundation from anthropologist Mary Douglas's seminal 1966 text Purity and Danger, which defined dirt as "matter out of place." The exhibition traces fashion's ongoing "nostalgia of mud," from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's influential 1983 Buffalo collection to Hussein Chalayan's buried graduation garments from his 1993 collection The Tangent Flows.
The Tribe mannequins display works that span the poetic, political, subversive and humorous dimensions of fashion's embrace of "dirty" aesthetics. Highlights include:
- Hussein Chalayan's buried garments – pieces from collections where clothing was interred with iron and copper filings, creating alchemically transformed, rust-stained textiles
- Alexander McQueen's Highland Rape collection (A/W 1995) – including a fragile lace dress now too delicate to mount on a mannequin, displayed instead in a glass vitrine
- Maison Margiela pieces – exploring decay and deconstruction under both Martin Margiela and John Galliano
- Elena Velez installations – representing a new generation of designers experimenting with distress and imperfection
Exhibition Design: Decay as Aesthetic
The exhibition design by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck complements the thematic content perfectly. The gallery space itself mirrors the exhibition's narrative of decay, with plinths that appear gradually more destroyed as visitors progress through the space. Walls feature spidering fissures and missing patches of plaster, creating a trompe l'oeil effect of controlled deterioration.
This environmental approach means the Tribe mannequins exist within a carefully constructed world where imperfection is celebrated rather than concealed. The grey-painted forms become almost archaeological presences, figures from which garments emerge like artefacts from an excavation.
Bonaveri's Ongoing Partnership with the Barbican
This collaboration continues Bonaveri's long-standing relationship with the Barbican Art Gallery. The company previously supplied Schläppi 2200 mannequins for The Vulgar – Fashion Redefined in 2016-17, curated by Judith Clark. That exhibition explored fashion excess through changing perceptions of vulgarity, with mannequins customised in calico fabric.
The choice of Tribe for Dirty Looks reflects the exhibition's contemporary focus and its exploration of fashion as an interdisciplinary artistic practice. Where The Vulgar demanded the elegant silhouettes of the Schläppi collection, Dirty Looks called for forms that embody modern youth culture while remaining sufficiently neutral to showcase experimental work spanning five decades.
Visitor Information
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion
Barbican Art Gallery, London
25 September 2025 – 25 January 2026
The exhibition includes Pay What You Can sessions every Thursday from 5-8pm and Friday from 10am-12pm. The gallery space is accessible via lifts to Level 3, with a passenger lift connecting the exhibition's two floors.
Bonaveri's Tribe mannequins are part of the B By Bonaveri collection, designed to represent the spirit of modern youth culture with androgynous faces and poses based on various heights. The collection is available in both male and female variations, suitable for diverse visual merchandising and exhibition contexts.
Image Credits: The Barbican.
