More Dirty Girls, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion (eds. Jon Astbury and Karen Van Godtsenhoven), Mack Books / SPBH Editions, September 2025
Essay for catalogue to the exhibition ‘Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion’ staged at the Barbican in 2025. The book and exhibition reveal the rich and varied ways in which fashion has harnessed the playful, radical, and regenerative potentials of dirt and waste as signifiers of rebellion, authenticity, and desirability. From garments that elevate stains and wornness into ornament, to clothing submerged in bogs or created by transforming fashion waste, the works presented within the book and publication challenge established notions of taste, beauty, and luxury, suggesting new pathways for fashion’s future.
The book contains new essays by influential voices in contemporary fashion, including Caroline Evans, Akiko Fukai, Lou Stoppard, and Sara Arnold. Their writing spans decolonial critique, feminist resistance, fashion’s environmental cost, and the tension between bodily intimacy and public display. Alongside these texts, an extensive photographic portfolio by Ellen Sampson captures iconic garments that embody the project’s themes in sharp, forensic detail. Featured designers include Vivienne Westwood, Hussein Chalayan, Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Alexander McQueen, Maison Margiela, and many more.
Extract:
I wrote the following essay in 2014, when I had just turned twenty-four. It was part of a series on ugliness, which I commissioned for SHOWstudio.com to investigate fashion’s complex relationship with the awkward or macabre, inspired by Miuccia Prada’s assertion that, ‘Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. Maybe because it is newer.’
I wrote the essay, in part, because I felt that no matter how ardently fashion purported to flirt with the aesthetically unsettling, certain aspects of ‘ugliness’, usually those related to the female body, were always off-limits – manicured body hair was fine but menstrual blood was not, smudged eye-liner was OK but cellulite was not. It was as if the female experience itself was too messy for fashion, which is – with all its promises of dreams and transcendence – a space in which a model is not a woman, but an emblem of ideal femininity.
It is always odd to look back on things one wrote as a young person – a bit like hearing one’s voice in an answer phone mail, it elicits a startling sense of separation and shame. Who is that fool speaking? At first, I considered updating the text, but that felt like ‘sanitation’ – scrubbing out bits that feel wrong for this moment, or polishing sentences to make them punchier or better-written. Such a process felt like it undermined the ethos of this exhibition, and the ‘warts and all’ ideal of the original text.
The idea of confronting the spectre of one’s former sense is also relevant to ugliness. Fashion’s relationship with beauty has squarely upheld youth as desirable. Facets of aging – weight, wrinkles, sagging – have always been rare on the runway, edited out of magazines. When I wrote the text, no one was talking about Ozempic, fillers were not available on every high street, the idea of Instagram face – a youthful, ethnically-ambiguous look that, according to the New Yorker, reveals an aspiration ‘toward a generic sameness’1 – was a short while off. I have changed too. Since I wrote the essay, I have had a child. At the end of each day, my outfits are no longer stained and scented by my own body and fluids but also by my daughter’s – poo, vomit, spit. In hormonally-driven moments of tenderness, I see things many others would find ugly as beautiful. I have grown up: in 3 days’ time, I turn 35. I have done all of this while wearing clothes. I have watched breastmilk leak across T-shirts, I have passed-on garments that felt ‘inappropriate’ for a pregnant, or post-partum body.
As I write this, the film The Substance plays in theatres. In it, an aging star, through injections of a black-market drug, conjures a younger version of herself, which she is both at one with and separate from, swapping consciousness every week. The gamble results not only in death – that would be too clean – but accelerated aging, cartoonish ugliness, decent into a total lumpish monstrosity. The film is a critique of the social pressure on women to defy aging. The fact its ending reaffirms the very fears and values it seeks to needle is both part of the joke and evidence of how rigidly ugliness is read as akin to demise. Fittingly, when commenting on the 2025 Oscars, at which the film was nominated, the writer Rachel Tashjian pointed to ‘weight loss drugs’ and ‘photo editing and AI-generated imagery’ as having ushered in ‘an outrageous drive for perfection that has overtaken Hollywood. […] Looking perfect is not enough. Women must now look too perfect. They are shrinking before our eyes, seeming to age backward’.2
‘The only reason Hollywood tolerates over 50s is because they look under 40,’3 agreed the Telegraph, alongside pictures of Nicole Kidman and Demi Moore, star of The Substance. Looking at the images, captured at the most prestigious acting award ceremony, it struck me that, so haunting is the association between ugliness and aging, it is seen as more rationale for many of celebrated actresses to completely immobilise their faces – the most vital tool of their craft – than it is to look their age. Thinking of the smorgasbord of vampiric treatments that many of them have surely undertaken, procedures in which blood or fat supplies are harvested from one part of the body and syringed into another, made me think of ‘The Head’, a short story by Bora Chung, from her 2022 collection, Cursed Bunny. In it a woman is haunted by a head that repeatedly appears within her toilet, made up of her own excrement, hair, and period blood. Over time, as she ages, it grows stronger, until it lifts itself out from the bowl, transformed into a full body, a shining version of her younger self, made from the debris of her cycles: the markers of aging. The older woman is forced to swap places – to climb into the toilet, to live amongst the dirt and decay she sought to dispose of.
So, when thinking about ugliness, a dialogue with my younger self felt like a fruitful experiment – a reflection of an age-old battle for beauty. I decided to leave the 2014 text as is – flaws visible – but to converse with it. To confront the ideas head on, and to challenge any accidental ugliness I found within them.
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We are a society that is intolerant of ugliness. We treat it almost like a sickness – something to be dealt with urgently and seriously. See an imperfection? Operate, treat, or medicate. If our hair is greying we dye it. If our skin is blotched we take Sebomin or Dianette. If our breasts or nose are too big, too small, or too crooked we take a trip to Harley Street, or abroad if we’re on a budget. We are in a constant process of cleaning ourselves up – preening, polishing, buffing, smoothing, removing, and generally sanitising. It’s an exhausting existence.
For years, the epitome of ugliness was filth. Dirt. Mud. Stains. Mould. They were synonymous with all that is evil, from witchcraft to the devil and death. Sebastian Pauli’s ‘As Soon as this Body’ from Lenten Sermons, penned in the seventeen century, even implies that the reason one should fear death is because of the process of becoming dirty, disgusting, and dishevelled that goes with it. The horror wasn’t eternal purgatory but physical grotesqueness:
As soon as this body is closed up in its tomb it changes colour, becoming yellow and pale, but with a certain nauseating pallor and wanness that makes one afraid. Then it will blacken from head to toe; and a grim and gloomy heat, like that of banked coals, will cover it entirely. Then the face, chest, and stomach will begin to swell strangely and a greasy mould will grow, the foul product of approaching corruption. Not long thereafter, that yellow and swollen stomach will begin to spit and burst here and there: thence will issue forth a slow lava of putrefaction and revolting things in which pieces and chunks of black and rotten flesh float and swim. Here you see a worm-ridden half an eye, there a strip of putrid and rotten lip; and further on a bunch of lacerated, bluish intestine. In this greasy muck a number of small flies will generate, as well as other disgusting little creatures that swarm and wind around one another in that corrupt blood.
How picturesque.
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I set up my Instagram account in 2012, two years before writing this text. The app launched in 2010, bringing with it the concept of filters, which could beautify one’s images, making them feel sun-kissed or candle-lit. Snapchat (launched September 2011) brought facial filters that made the point of that tweaking more direct – one could better oneself. From 2016, Instagram Stories allowed one to take selfies with filters such as ‘Plastics’ and ‘Top Model Look’ which revealed what one could look like with arched eye brows, taughtened skin, or various other interventions only available by needle (ironically, not long after, surgeons reported that many people were no longer turning up for their consultations with reference pictures of neat-nosed celebrities, but instead images of their own filtered faces). The accusation of ‘air-brushing’ – to borrow a retro term still often levied at fashion magazines – is now a facet of everyday life. Our approach to ugliness is now less an intolerance than an outright denial – no one thinks twice about re-taking a photo, cropping a selfie. Ugliness is constantly postponed: treated as entirely unnecessary.