When Fashion Cuts Deep

Twenty-six years later, the razor blade dress returns — not on the catwalk, but in the Barbican’s new exhibition Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion.

Razor blade dress, London Fashion Week, 1998.

In September 1998, London Fashion Week closed with a model walking through a runway of white powder, wearing a dress made from hundreds of razor blades. That show was Cocaine Nights.

It was designed to get headlines. And it did. But more than that, it was staged as a Ballardian system.

J.G. Ballard’s novel Cocaine Nights, published two years earlier, described a fictional Spanish resort where culture—art, theatre, meaning—was sustained not by leisure but by criminality. Transgression wasn’t a collapse of order; it was the structure that held it together. Ballard wasn’t describing civilisation’s end, but its strange persistence, propped up by violence.

That was the logic behind the collection. Cocaine Nights wasn’t a theme. It was a model.

Show invitation, Cocaine Nights, 1998.

On the surface, the clothes were white, clean, controlled. But beneath them was friction. The show took place at the Truman Brewery in East London, a former brewery turned art gallery, but it could have unfolded just as easily in one of Ballard’s private clubs or coastal compounds. The runway was powdered white. The soundtrack was mechanical. The faces were impassive. The outfits were all white, with tailored shapes and restricted movement, conveying containment.

And then came the razor blade dress.

The Guardian, The Editor, September 1998.

Press Reaction

The response was immediate and divided.

The Sun: “Sickest Fashion Show of All Time.

Evening Standard: “Razor Blade Stunt Cuts No Ice in Fashion Flop.”

The Guardian, The Editor: “Would you wear this? The fashion editors won’t.”

Tabloid outrage was predictable. Critical disdain sharper. And the industry’s discomfort was more revealing than either.

The dress wasn’t a metaphor. It visualised something fashion didn’t want to acknowledge: the quiet violence of surface, the proximity between control and harm.

At the time, I said I was holding up a mirror to the front row. They didn’t like what they saw.

What Ballard understood was that culture often depends on the very things it claims to reject. Violence, addiction, alienation, surveillance: not as threats to civil society, but as the scaffolding holding it up. In Ballard’s world, pathology is infrastructure.

By then, fashion had already internalised that logic.

Heroin chic. Trauma styling. Spectacle dressed as collapse. These weren’t aberrations. They were signals. The industry was trading in images of dysfunction and disavowing them at the same time. Cocaine Nights made that disavowal harder to maintain. The razor blade dress didn’t just imply harm; it showed how tightly beauty and damage were entangled, leaving no room for aesthetic distance.

The Sun, September 1998.

Twenty-Six Years Later

Today, the razor blade dress returns in Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion at the Barbican. Not safely behind glass, but displayed openly as both garment and proposition.

Ballard asked what holds a community together when comfort becomes suffocating — and whether violence, once aestheticised, could supply the charge of meaning. The razor blade dress takes that provocation literally. The danger is neither hidden nor neutralised; it is on the surface, part of the design.

What does it mean to turn violence into fashion?

When violence is aestheticised, does it lose its edge, or cut deeper?

These questions haven’t gone away. If anything, they’ve become more urgent.

Dirty Looks examines how garments bear evidence of wear, of time, of contamination. The razor blade dress hasn’t changed. It still reflects the contradiction between precision and threat. It still makes the room uneasy.

Because the violence it revealed was never incidental. Fashion has always been built on systems of violence. In its materials. In its labour. In the ways it disciplines bodies.

Violence is not fashion’s exception. It is its foundation. And it’s the reason why the wounds that this dress opened refuse to heal.

The razor blade dress is currently on display in Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion at the Barbican, London, 25 September 2025 – 25 January 2026. Find out more.