Things to do in London today

Once again, Hyde Park has had its annual transformation into a dazzling, snow-covered, Alpine-themed, 350-acre festive funscape. One of the largest Christmas events in the UK, Winter Wonderland returns for its eighteenth year in 2025, and is expected to welcome around 2.5 million visitors over six magical weeks.  As you make your way around the space, you’ll find fairground rides, a child-friendly Santa Land (including a Santa’s Grotto, where presents lie in wait) and traditional Christmas markets where you’ll be able to buy gifts for all your loved ones, which has been freshly extended for 2025 with the addition of premium, artfully lit shopping spot Luminarie Lane. Other highlights include circus shows from Cirque Beserk, which take place three times each evening, and the biggest outdoor ice rink in the UK. Surrounding the park’s Victorian bandstand, the 1,795 square foot rink is sponsored by Mayfair’s new art museum Moco. Not only is it lit up by more than 100,000 lights, it’s also a rather cheerful shade of candyfloss pink in keeping with the museum’s logo. Continuing the chilly theme, there's also an ice sculpture exhibit that's been freshly reimagined as a 'Mystical, Mythical Fantasy World', a Real Ice Slide and ice sculpting workshops, after which you can warm yourself up later with frothing steins and steaming cups of mulled wine at the German-style Bavarian Village. ...

Every winter the Southbank Centre turns the banks of the Thames into a frosty wonderland, full of little wooden Alpine-style cabins selling gifts, warming drinks, and snacks. You’ll find huts serving up truffle burgers, duck wraps, mulled wine, Dutch pancakes, churros and many more tasty morsels to nibble on while you look through gifts, jewellery and decorations made by independent craft traders. Or, once you’re done browsing, snuggle up at pop-up king Jimmy Garcia’s riverside venue Fire And Fromage, where you can snaffle all you can eat raclette, sip on seriously decadent hot chocolates, and even toast your own marshmallows round a cosy fire pit.  When is Southbank Christmas Market open? The market opens at the start of November, and will stay open until Boxing Day, Friday, December 26, with a few pop-ups staying open slightly longer until the New Year. Do you need to buy a ticket? No, it's free to enter and have a wander. 

Prepare for a feast for the eyes, but resist the urge to nibble! The sweetest festive event you’ll find, the Museum of Architecture’s edible exhibition tasks leading architects and designers to ditch their conventional building materials for dough bricks and sugar paste mortar to construct a miniature biscuit metropolis erected in King’s Cross’s Coal Drops Yard for the festive season. With a new theme each year, the exhibition aims to encourage innovation and future-forward city planning, and this year’s ‘Playful City’ theme has resulted in some really fun designs, from school buildings with slides between classrooms to candy-coloured climbing walls. As well as marvelling at all the confectionary craftsmanship on display, visitors can take part in a series of hands-on gingerbread house workshops where they’ll be able to construct a delicious souvenir to take home. 

There's arguably nowhere in London more Christmassy than Covent Garden's Piazza in December. Every year, the shopping district aims to outdo itself for sheer festive pizzaz. In 2025, the theme is 'The Theatre of Christmas', which means that there'll be decorations taking inspiration from the nearby playhouses and the performances in them. And of course, this year will also see the return of Covent Garden's 55ft Christmas tree, decked with 30,000 lights  Meanwhile, the roof of the Market Building is adorned with 40 gigantic bells, 12 giant baubles and 8 spinning mirror balls in a reprise of its oh-so-festive annual display. There'll also be pop-ups and events to enjoy as the season unfolds, including mulled wine stations and a Santa's sleigh photo op. 

Somerset House’s annual ice rink pop-up has long been one of the city’s favourite festive traditions, with thousands of Londoners and tourists alike making it part of their celebrations each year, and for good reason. Gliding (or nervously shuffling) around the rink, gazing upon the surrounding Georgian architecture and the courtyard’s magnificent 40ft Christmas tree feels like you’ve skated onto a movie set, ready to be watched by families settling in for their post-turkey food coma.  There’s more to this rink than just skating, though. There are seasonal drinks and warming food options available from a rinkside chalet, alongside a Shelter Boutique with takeovers from sought-after brands including Oliver Bonas, All Saints and Nobody’s Child in the run-up to Christmas. And there also a variety of events to keep you entertained throughout the season, including the venue's famous Skate Lates, where you can soar round the rink to a DJ soundtrack. The line-up for 2025 includes trailblazing women-run radio station Foundation FM, NTS Radio host Ruf Dug and queer dance party Sue Veneers. How much does Skate at Somerset House cost? Ticket prices for Skate at Somerset House vary depending on what time you visit, with cheaper tickets at less popular times, and concessions available for kids. They start at £11 for super off-peak times, reaching £26 for the most in-demand slots. Booking for the 2025-2026 goes live on Friday September 26 or you can sign up to the presale here for early...

Get yourself feeling ridiculously festive with an evening of carols inside Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpiece, aka St Paul’s Cathedral. The legendary London landmark hosts a series of mostly free, unticketed carol concerts each year. Visit over December for a huge range of concerts, including family-friendly services, Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur (one of the greatest organ works of the 20th century), and traditional carols. Things kick off with an advent service on November 29. The big events to look out for are A Celebration of Christmas (Dec 9) and the Christmas Carol Services (Dec 23 and 24. The concerts are always hugely popular, so get down there early and be prepared to queue. Start practising your high notes now. You can find full information here. 

What do an Enigma machine, an Apple AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s silk underwear all have in common? Well, they’re all currently on display at the British Library’s riveting Secret Maps exhibition. Why are they all together? Because they all tell stories about how information is created, concealed, disseminated and controlled, via mapping. And that’s exactly what Secret Maps is all about.  Through more than 100 items, from hand-drawn naval charts gifted to Henry VIII, to Soviet Cold War-era cartographies, and modern-day satellite tracking technology (TL;DR: a whole lotta maps), the British Library illuminates how maps can be powerful political tools, create communities, and act as a form of protest.  It’s a dense, information-packed display with plenty of granular detail to get stuck into, so if you’re not, like, really into maps, then it may not be for you. But it’s sort of what you’d expect for an exhibition dedicated to maps hosted by the British Library. There are a few fun and interactive elements, too; visitors are invited to peer through secret spy holes, place their phones on a futuristic screen that tells them exactly how the tech overlords are mapping and harvesting their data (gulp), and find Wally in an original drawing from the children’s book.  For £20 you are guaranteed to see a lot of cool old shit The most compelling aspect of the exhibition is its anti-colonialist streak (other London museums could do with taking a leaf out of the British Library’s...

Dreaming of a kitsch Christmas? New York’s famous Miracle on Ninth Street bar is popping up in London for its seventh year, ‘50s Christmas decorations, nostalgic accessories and creative new spins on beloved cocktail favourites in tow. Past years have seen the bar slinging the likes of a Snowball Old Fashioned or a Christmapoliton, which includes cranberry sauce and absinthe mist – a take on Christmas trimmings that’s not for the faint-hearted. If you’re failing to get into the Christmas spirit, this is one great place to find it.

Escape the Oxford Street crowds with a detour into pretty Carnaby Street, which puts on memorable Christmas light displays each year. A revamp of last year’s ‘Into the Light’ display, 2025’s ‘All is Bright’ features giant cuboid Christmas crackers and stars illumin illuminated in bright neons by more than 60,000 LED lights, and apparently captures ‘the joy and optimism of the season while reflecting the creativity and vibrancy that make Soho unique’. Find more fabulous Christmas light displays in London

Backyard Cinema is back with a mega immersive cinema to give you all the festive feels. Roam through a fairylit winter forest and you'll find screenings of Christmas classics including Elf, Home Alone, Love Actually, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Holiday, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, The Grinch, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Things begin in a Christmas cabaret room with live performances of festive classics and table service so you can enjoy seasonal refreshments. Then, you'll enter an enchanted forest, with real bark underfoot, surprise performances, themed bars and photo opportunities. Finally, you'll end up at the Forest Cinema, a retro-style cinema where snow flutters down before every screening. A trip to the movies really doesn't get more festive than this. 

It would be a mistake to say the humour in Cole Escola’s massive hit Broadway comedy has been lost in translation to the West End: there was a lot of laughter when I caught Oh, Mary! on a Wednesday matinee. However, I’m afraid it was lost in translation to me.  I didn’t hate this lurid cabaret about Abraham Lincoln’s wife. But after the slew of American critics describing the life-changing injuries they’d suffered from laughing so hard at Sam Pinkleton’s production, the whole thing just felt a bit… ’70s? A little bit Airplane!, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean… Really it’s broad, dated humour salvaged by a tremendous cast headed by Jamie Lloyd veteran Mason Alexander Park as Mary and the redoubtable Giles Terera as ‘Mary’s husband’ (ie Abe). Of course, a lot of British people like ’70s humour: this is a country that still remains dangerously hooked on the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. But Oh, Mary! is an old-fashioned farce built on two gags: one, Mary is a boozy narcissist – borderline feral – who dreams of the stage; and two, Abraham Lincoln is gay. To be fair, there are few cows more sacred in America than Lincoln, and this is of course queer artist Escola co-opting the iconic president, not mocking gay people. Still I’d struggle to say what the difference would be in terms of execution. I don’t know much about Lincoln’s personal life, but the idea of him being a cartoonishly repressed gay man is not in and of itself that funny to me. ...

Unless you’re fluent in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hiberno-English, John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World requires proper, eyes-wide-open concentration. And even more so in this NT revival, in which director Caitríona McLaughlin celebrates the lyrical language of the play in all its glory. At its best, hers is a production that rewards attentiveness, weaving in beautiful, affecting images of County Mayo folklore alongside some standout acting performances. But despite the play’s undeniable importance within the Irish canon, it feels like a strange choice for the National Theatre’s 2025 programme, and the production comes across as a hodgepodge of competing ideas.Not all of that is down to McLaughlin. There’s the rambling, stretched-out plot in which young Christy Mahon arrives at a small local pub, claims he has killed his father, and then, rather than being shunned, becomes something of a village celebrity. What follows are strings of repetitive scenes in which the truth about Christy’s story threatens to come out. Despite an assured, characterful performance, Éanna Hardwicke makes Christy a constantly wowed dufus. Which begs the question: could this really be a man who has hordes of women running after him?It is one of many confusing directorial decisions from McLaughlin, who attempts to lean into both the comedy and the pathos in Synge’s script. Crowds of mummers in traditional dress appear between the scenes, while mourners dressed all in black...

The much-feted Sam Grabiner’s second play – following last year’s Olivier-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears – is a dark, dark comedy about a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional British Jewish family.  It is an anarchic meditation on the British Jewish psyche, that is really very fearless about ‘going there’ with certain political issues. It is about the British tradition of having a massive ding dong on Christmas Day. And it’s a comedy about living in London.  As the play begins, a bewildered Elliot (Nigel Lindsay) has arrived at the chaotic office conversion inhabited by his children Noah (Samuel Blenkin) and Tamara (Bel Powley), plus 10 other housemates who’ve mostly vacated the place because today is Christmas Day.  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Elliot exclaims in horror at the room’s most noticable feature: some sort of industrial heater, suspended from the ceiling in spectacularly unwise fashion, that periodically roars into life very loudly.  It’s a dinner-party play, kind of: food is the nominal main event (a Chinese takeaway, in imitation of New York Jewish tradition), and as is the way with the genre, secrets are unveiled, revelations are revealed, etcetera.  James Macdonald’s production feels genre-cliche free, though, in part because the ‘family’ is so shambolic that food simply feels like another thing for them to argue about. Joining dithering Noah and pathologically intense Tamara is Noah’s sweet non-Jewish girlfriend Maud (Callie Cooke) and Tamara’s slick ex Aaron...

Flex time: 14 years ago I caught Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway. It was good, although I was definitely distracted by both my jet lag and the fact it starred Robin Williams. The subject matter – the Second Iraq War – was a popular one at the time, and the play perhaps just seemed like the starry culmination of a wider phenomenon.  It never made it to the UK. Or not until now. Omar Elerian’s Young Vic production is Bengal Tiger’s British debut, coming as part of a belated wave of interest in playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose King James was performed at Hampstead earlier this year and whose Archduke will form part of the Royal Court’s 70th birthday season next year. What’s most immediately striking is how weird it is. Much of it comes from the point of view of the ghost of a tiger (Kathryn Hunter), who starts the play alive but soon gets shot dead after Tom (Patrick Gibson) – astonishingly only the second stupidest of its two US soldier characters – taunts it with food, which leads to the big cat biting his hand off.  Although there is a through thread, Joseph's play is best viewed as a series of vignettes or playlets about the nightmare of post-Saddam Iraq, stalked by ghosts, madness and greed for the deposed dictator’s fabled hoarded wealth.  It’s a portrait of a world upended, where the only person not losing their mind is Hunter’s Tiger who is – broadly speaking – entirely unfussed about having been killed. There is the vaguest suggestion of tigerishness in...

This is the tenth anniversary of the Palladium panto, which is remarkable in a way as it kind of feels like London’s biggest festive show has been around forever. In part that’s because there is, to be blunt, relatively little annual variation: a core cast of middle aged men who’ve been there since the beginning do amusing turns byt way of back up to Julian Clary, who effortlessly walks off with the show by playing a series of flimsily disguised variants on himself (this year he plays a character called King Julian), with every utterance is a virtuosically smutty innuendo that blessedly sails over the heads of primary schoolers. There’s usually a big guest headline star from the world of light entertainment too: this year it’s Catherine Tate, who’ll be playing Carabosse the Wicked Fairy. Palladium panto lifers Paul Zerdin and Nigel Havers are back, as are more recent additions to the crew Rob Madge, Jon Culshaw and Amonik Melaco. Compared to the likes of Hackney or the Lyric Hammersmith, the Palladium Panto is much closer to a series of variety turns than a work of theatre with a plot. But that’s all to the good at the Palladium, and ten blockbuster years on they’re perfectly entitled to subscribe to the old adage of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There may be a big Old Vic revival of Arcadia just around the corner, but it does feel a bit odd that this is the first production of a Tom Stoppard play since his death at the end of November. For the last three years Hampstead Theatre has been staging lesser-revived Stoppards over Christmas, and for Stoppard fans it’s been fun to see them come to life. But Indian Ink is a deep cut. A vehicle for his former partner Felicity Kendal, Stoppard wrote it first as a radio drama called In the Native State and then expanded and enriched it into this version, which premiered in 1995. Reviews didn’t rave about it back then, and never really have since, and Jonathan Kent’s production doesn’t get around the problems that, despite moving moments, remain in the bones of the play.Split across two(ish) timelines, it tells the story of poet Flora Crewe: first we meet her in India in 1930 where she encounters local painter Nirad Das, who does a portrait of her while she is slowly dying from TB; second, sixty years later, Flora’s ageing sister Mrs Swan reflecting on her letters with an academic trying to write a biography, as well as Das’s son Amish.Ruby Ashbourne Serkis plays Flora with an accent that could cut diamond – think Kiera Knightley but posher – Bette Davis eyes and the kind of easy grace that throws back to golden age Hollywood stars. She’s breezy, sexually free, with a huge smile. It’s a very strong lead performance. While she romanticises India – blithe about the brewing...

Thanks to the freakish success of the National Theatre’s 1992 production of An Inspector Calls – it’s still touring to this day – JB Priestley is largely destined to be remembered as a one-play playwright.  And to be fair, that’s still an amazing legacy. But away from the burningly intense social interrogation of Inspector Goole, Priestly has plenty to offer, including When We are Married, a somewhat dated but thoroughly delightful social comedy that stands out from the period pack by sheer weight of northernness.  Timothy Sheader’s twinkle-eyed revival finds a nice balance between updating the play and surrendering to its innate charms. His production begins with cynical charwoman Mrs Northrop (Janice Connolly) greeting us through the fourth wall as if we were a pantomime audience before launching into Gracie Fields’ 1938 banger ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, a song that (as far as I can tell) has nothing to do with When We are Married beyond being released in the same year. Nonetheless, it clearly inspired Peter McKintosh’s delightful set, a dazzlingly yellow arts and crafts drawing room dominated by a preposterously huge potted plant. And on the more modern side, Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ plays out at what is possibly the single funniest point in the entire play for Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ to play out.  Notoriously bluff Yorkshireman Priestley didn’t go in much for either subtext or subplots, and part of the joy of When We are Married is that it’s basically...

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

Cementing the Lyric Hammersmith’s place at the top of the London panto pantheon, here’s a wonderfully inventive new take on Jack and the Beanstalk for 2025.  I’ve seen some high-concept pantomimes take a swing and a miss, but returning writer Sonia Jalay and director Nicolai La Barrie are impressively assured as they relocate the bean-centric action to a strict Hammersmith school concealing a sinister secret. Siblings Jack (Joey James) and Jill (Sienna Widd) are newly enrolled at the ultra strict Fleshcreep Academy, and while John Patridge’s meat-obsessed (he even wears a meat-pattered suit) Fleshcreep bears zero resemblance to the rather scarier Katherine Birbalsingh, it’s not hard to see see the whole enjoyably unruly spectacle as a satire on the fetishisation of ‘strict’ modern schooling.  The imperious grandeur of regular Lyric dame Emmanuel Akwafo is somewhat missed, although replacement Sam Harrison is great fun when he’s allowed off the leash – his best moment is cracking himself up by ad libbing about the Lily Allan album to an audience of bemused primary schoolers. But there’s something fundamentally amusing about the plot point of his Momma Trott being worked in as the flamboyant new Fleshcreep Academy dinner lady, much to the mortification of her kids.  James is nice as socially anxious Jack who communicates with most people via a lairy sock puppet. And in her first named stage role, recent graduate Widd is scene-stealing good as the fearlessly bolshy Jill, a...

The Hackney panto’s USP is Clive Rowe: less a dame than a roiling force of nature, post pandemic he has not only starred in every panto at the Empire but directed them too, in what has increasingly felt like a one man (in a frock) show.  But what happens to the one-man show when the man (and his frock) aren’t there?  Rowe is such a panto purist that he refuses to perform in productions of Cinderella, reasoning that there is no dame role in it. So this year, he’s directing only. And it’s probably not a bad idea: the underlying fundamentals of this year’s panto are stronger than in recent years, where the secondary characters feel like they’ve been left to wither on the vine while Rowe swans off with the glory. This show’s heart lies with its villains: Alexandra Waite-Roberts is the very definition of ‘pantomime villain’ as Oblivia, Cinderella’s cacklingly evil stepmother who in this version offed her stepdaughter’s dad years previously and barely makes any effort to conceal the fact. ‘Ugly sisters’ is a term that has fallen out of fashion in recent years, but in the roles that used to be called that, George Heyworth and Kat B are great fun as Nausea and Flatula, two women who aren’t so much evil as incredibly dumb. In the absence of Rowe, the audience work falls to them – they make a solid enough job of it – and they memorably join forces with Nicholas McLean’s prissy Buttons for a run through ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ that lasts something like 10 minutes and heavily...

Born in a fishing village in Denmark in 1859, Anna Ancher painted and memorialised life on the coast, cementing herself as a Danish household name. Now Dulwich Picture Gallery brings Ancher’s work to a UK audience in her first ever British exhibition, which will showcase over 40 of her luminous paintings, many of which are reminiscent of the coastal community where she grew up. Also featuring in the exhibition will be four of Ancher’s contemporaries: Marie Luplau, Emilie Mundt, Marie Sandholdt, and Louise Bonfils. 

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

London’s cultural institutions are having a love affair with the New Romantics this year. First there was Outlaws, the Fashion and Textile Museum’s exhibition on the subversive fashion trends of 1980s London. Then the Tate Modern announced a major retrospective on pioneering fashion maverick Leigh Bowery. Now it’s the Design Museum’s turn to direct its attention towards the most flamboyant subculture of its era, via this exhibition on the Blitz club, the iconic (and we really don’t use that word lightly) Covent Garden nightclub where New Romanticism was born in 1979. Forty years after it closed, the trailblazing club’s atmosphere will be recreated through a ‘sensory extravaganza’ incorporating music, film, art, graphic design and some very ostentatious outfits. This will include several items that have never been on public display before, while some of the scene’s key figures have been involved in the development of the exhibition. Time to liberally apply the kohl eyeliner, fish out your frilliest shirt and whack on some Spandau Ballet: the 80s are back, baby!

Hot on the heels of September’s merry-go-round of Fashion Weeks, the National Portrait Gallery’s latest opening is another moment to reflect on what fashion and beauty mean to us today. A second outing in five years for the trailblazing 20th century photographer, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World unfolds like a billowing ballgown; opulent and eye-catching, but it can’t help tripping over its long hem. The glittering charm, however, forgives its clumsiness.  Beaton’s previous outing at NPG in 2020 was cut short after only five days because of the pandemic. Rather than reviving Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, this revamped exhibition presents him as more than just a photographer. Younger audiences are likely to find this show more relatable, through its emphasis on his contributions to costume and set design, given their ascendant roles in contemporary fashion. From curious beginnings to his rise through the cultural upper-class, his war photography and costume designs for My Fair Lady, we get a good look at how places and periods influenced Beaton’s style.  If anything, this show is about how big Beaton’s prop and costume chest is. Elaborately grandiose outfits screaming over intricate backgrounds made his early shots look like stills from the kind of plays Aristophanes would’ve put on during his day. Flirting with the avant-garde in Paris, Beaton’s staging and costumes turn weird and uncanny. Even during the war there’s a bold expressionism to his framing that only...

Video games are the medium for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The young artist uses them to ‘imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories’ - this isn’t just point-and-shoot, slack-jawed gaming for the sake of it, this is one of contemporary society’s most important cultural forms being used to give voice to marginalised identities. 

If you’re a non-disabled person, you may never have given any proper thought to the many ways in which the world is designed without regard for the needs of disabled members of our society.  Described as ‘both a celebration and a call to action’, this V&A exhibition seeks to rectify that, exploring the social history of design and disability from the 1940s to the present. Opening in summer 2025, it promises to highlight the contributions made by disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse communities to art, design, fashion, photography and architecture, as well as outlining how design can be made more inclusive and accessible in the future.   

To the layperson, high-fashion shows can be a source of confusion. Why would anyone spend thousands on a dress constructed entirely of razor blades, or a pair of decrepit shoes that have been deliberately sullied or even torched? Well, because sometimes creating unwearable garments is actually the point, thank you very much. And that’s exactly what the Barbican’s latest fashion exhibition illustrates.  From the controversial £1,400 Balenciaga destroyed trainers, to Jordanluca’s pee-soaked jeans, and dresses that have been pulled out of bogs, Dirty Looks peers at the muckier side of fashion design. Don’t expect immaculate gowns displayed solemnly in glass cases. This isn’t a historical look at haute couture, or a glossy advert for a fashion house concealed inside a gallery show. The exhibition, featuring more than 120 garments from designers including Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, takes a clever thematic approach to the philosophy of dirt within fashion, showing how ideas around industrialisation, colonisation, the body, and waste, can be illustrated on the runway.  One particularly icky room is dedicated to bodily fluids, showing artificially sweat and period-stained garb, others to food stains, pieces made with rubbish and to trompe l’oeil faux-grimy clothing.Stand-out pieces include a torn and muddy lace dress from Alexander McQueen’s controversial ‘Highland Rape’ collection, a creepy Miss Havisham-esque Comme des Garçons...

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times. This, her first major European solo exhibition, presents just a sliver of her oeuvre. It’s an impressive introduction to a visionary artist and, to those unfamiliar with Aboriginal art, a new way of understanding art. Naturally, this show needs more exposition than most. It requires European audiences to let go of their art-historical baggage. For example, the colourful works on show here aren’t straightforwardly representational but it would be wrong to call them abstract. Rather than leave us to experience Kngwarray’s work on the familiar-but-inaccurate terms that define western art, the exhibition takes two rooms to provide a potted education on Aboriginal art and life and the artist’s place within it. Dreaming, for example, is an important religio-cultural term that pervades the exhibition, connecting Aboriginal Peoples with their ancestors through the land. This show needs more exposition than most The exhibition finds confident form in its third room, where more than a dozen large-scale acrylic paintings, all replete with coloured dots, surround a procession of batik prints on silk that hang from the ceiling. Interconnectedness is less a feature of these works than an underpinning of them. In each of the...

It’s not that long ago that British art bigwigs Gilbert & George grew so frustrated with what they saw as a lack of attention from the UK’s art institutions that they set up their very own museum dedicated to themselves. That big whinge seems a bit premature now that the Hayward is giving them a big exhibition looking at their work since the turn of the millennium, a period that has seen them satirising everything from hope and fear to sex and religion.

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.