4 Fashion Exhibitions Opening in London This Fall
London's cultural institutions are preparing to showcase fashion from multiple perspectives this autumn. From the rebellious aesthetics of decay to royal glamour, from behind-the-scenes costume craftsmanship to pioneering photography, these exhibitions will explore fashion as art, cultural commentary, and transformative power. Whether examining contemporary designers' relationship with environmental concerns or celebrating historical figures who shaped style, each exhibition offers a different lens through which to understand fashion's enduring influence.
Robert Wun’s Wine Stained dress
1. Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion - Barbican Art Gallery
25 September 2025 – 25 January 2026
What drives fashion's enduring interest in the tattered, the torn, and the deliberately decayed? The Barbican's return to fashion programming after an eight-year hiatus promises to be provocative, bringing together designers from around the world to examine how "dirty" aesthetic has become a radical form of creative expression that questions our relationship with consumption, beauty, and luxury.
What began as rebellion in the 1980s has evolved into something far more complex. When Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren first championed mud-splattered aesthetics, they were challenging traditional notions of luxury and class. Alongside this Western transgression, Japanese designers like Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto were also challenging Western notions of beauty and perfection by embracing transience and imperfection through wabi-sabi principles that found beauty in wear and patina.
Hussein Chalayan's buried garments will serve as a powerful centrepiece, demonstrating how fashion can embody cycles of death and rebirth. His influential graduate collection submerged clothes with iron filings to creates pieces that literally become one with the earth, oxidizing and transforming over months. Today, while distressed clothing no longer carries the same shock factor, a new generation of emerging designers continues to revisit ideas of dirt and decay for their symbolic power – using them as tools to visualise renewal, resistance and new desirable futures for fashion.
Nigerian label IAMISIGO uses natural materials as an act of cultural healing—repairing connections to the land severed by colonialism, while Solitude Studios submerges fabric in Danish bogs, where microorganisms don't just dye the material but begin to consume it—a process that references ancient fertility rituals while creating entirely new textile experiences.
Robert Wun's wine-stained evening gowns and burned silk ensembles (photos) elevate accidents and damage into high art, while Paolo Carzana's naturally dyed, handcrafted pieces point toward more sustainable futures.
The Barbican's radical exhibition design will mirror these themes, intentionally "destroying" the gallery's pristine surfaces to create tension between perfection and decay. This isn't mere aesthetic choice—it's a statement about how fashion can make us confront uncomfortable truths about waste, desire, and the environmental cost of our clothing choices.
Moschino show, Runway, Fall Winter 2020, Milan Fashion Week. Photo PIXELFORMULA,SIPA, Shutterstock
2. Marie Antoinette Style - V&A South Kensington
20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026
Few historical figures have wielded fashion as a form of power quite like Marie Antoinette, and the V&A's first exhibition dedicated to the ill-fated French queen will reveal how her influence has reverberated through centuries of design. Far more than a costume display, visitors will discover how a young Austrian archduchess transformed herself into history's most fashionable monarch, creating a distinctive aesthetic that continues to captivate designers, filmmakers, and artists today.
Marie Antoinette may have been history's first fashion influencer, using dress to craft a personal brand that transcended royal protocol. Her adoption of simple muslin gowns and pastoral aesthetics at Petit Trianon scandalized a court expecting rigid formality but created a template for how fashion could express individuality and rebellion. Her extravagant dress became ammunition for her critics, as her clothing choices became symbols of aristocratic excess during a time of economic hardship, ultimately contributing to the revolutionary fervour that cost her life.
Beyond some exceptional loans from Versailles such as her silk slippers and toilette case, the exhibition will tracing Marie Antoinette's ongoing cultural resurrection from Sofia Coppola's candy-colored cinematic vision and Manolo Blahnik's delicate shoes created for the film to creations by Moschino, Vivienne Westwood, and Valentino, amongst others.
In examining her legacy, the exhibition aims to reveal how fashion remains a language of power, resistance, and reinvention—themes as relevant today as they were in the 18th century.
; Audrey Hepburn in costume for My Fair Lady, 1963. @The Cecil Beaton Archive, London.
3. Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World
National Portrait Gallery
9 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
The National Portrait Gallery's first major exhibition dedicated to Cecil Beaton will explore his pioneering contributions to fashion photography charting his meteoric rise and distinguished legacy.
The exhibition will celebrate how his signature artistic style – a marriage of Edwardian stage glamour and the elegance of a new age – revitalised and revolutionised fashion photography and led him to the pinnacles of creative achievement.
Curated by Vogue's Robin Muir, the exhibition will demonstrate how Beaton created a photographic language that married Edwardian theatrical grandeur with surrealist experimentation and American modernist techniques, all filtered through an unmistakably English sensibility.
Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton didn't just document fashion—he fundamentally changed how we understand the relationship between photography, style, and celebrity culture.
Visitors will journey through Beaton's evolution from a young Edwardian experimenting with his first camera on his sisters and mother, through his Cambridge years where he honed his creative voice, to his emergence as the definitive chronicler of the "Bright Young Things" era.
The exhibition will also explore Beaton's genius for understanding fashion as theater. His background as a costume designer—culminating in his Oscar-winning work on "My Fair Lady"—informed his approach to fashion photography, where every element from lighting to background to pose was orchestrated to create fantasy. His photographs weren't just recordings of beautiful clothes, but elaborate productions that transformed fashion photography into high art.
Out of Africa, Meryl Streep, 1985, © Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
4. Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop - Fashion and Textile Museum
26 September 2025 – Spring 2026
Behind every unforgettable period drama lies an unsung hero—the costume house that transforms actors into believable historical figures. The Fashion and Textile Museum's celebration of Cosprop will pull back the curtain on sixty years of costume magic, revealing how this North London atelier revolutionized the way we see the past on screen. Visitors will discover that what they assumed were merely "costumes" are actually masterworks of historical reconstruction that required the same skills as haute couture.
Founded by Oscar-winning costume designer John Bright, Cosprop established a new approach to period clothing. Rather than creating generalized "period looks," the company committed to authentic historical construction methods, using the same techniques that seamstresses and tailors would have employed centuries ago. Visitors will learn how this obsessive attention to detail—down to corsets and petticoats that will never be seen on camera—creates the authenticity that makes actors move differently, feel different, and ultimately become the characters they're portraying.
