"In the show, "dirty" extends to anything that breaks fashion's pact with propriety. Here are clothes caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded. The garments span decades, from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier built their fame on defying convention, to today, when corporatization has made such daring increasingly rare. But forgoing practicality frees certain designers from the demands that the body be polite-and thereby policed."
"What makes Dirty Looks so refreshing is that curators Karen Van Godtsenhoven and Jon Astbury don't gloss over fashion's mercenary and appropriative impulses. The industry might promise radicalism, but it rarely challenges the status quo. From beatnik to punk and grunge, the most cunning designers know how to co-opt those waves of rebellion while persuading their adherents that fashion is integral to their expression. That filching of subculture has produced moments both questionable and unforgettable, like John Galliano's infamous 2000 "Hobo Chic" collection for Christian Dior."
The exhibition gathers garments stained, patched, and partially destroyed—caked in grime, blotted with makeup, stiffened by salt, pieced from trash, frayed, and faded—to foreground alternative beauty and bodily truth. The selection spans the 1980s through the mid-2000s and up to the present, tracing designers who built reputations on defying convention while noting corporatization's dampening of daring. Certain looks reject practicality, allowing clothes to register sweat, wear, and bodily fluids as erotic, romantic, and political statements. Curators acknowledge fashion's mercenary habit of co-opting subcultures, showing how appropriation produced both questionable and unforgettable moments.
Read at Documentjournal
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