Does this look ugly? A bit trashy? Tasteless? Really stupid? These are the usual questions I’ll be asking you when we go clothes shopping together, but perhaps more unusually, the answer I’m always looking for is a resounding yes. Ugliness is nothing new to fashion, and designers and cultural icons have been abandoning and experimenting with traditional ideas of taste and beauty for many years. However, lots of people still struggle to see the benefits of inviting ugliness into their personal wardrobes, even though we’re all probably starting to get a little tired of the meticulously slick ‘clean girl’. As we start to see the world around us fill with soullessly perfect AI images, ugliness is perhaps more urgently needed than ever before.
“We suggest you look to the colourful history of ugly and trashy style, and get a little more filthy!”
In opposition to the clean girl, we propose a fashion of filth. Acknowledging filth as an alternate aesthetic category to beauty allows you to incorporate the ugly and trashy into your wardrobe in a deliberate and informed way, preserving how fun, varied, and interesting fashion can be. If you ever struggle with the ever-growing confines of aesthetic perfection, we suggest you look to the colourful history of ugly and trashy style, and get a little more filthy!
Of course, we can’t talk about filth without bringing up the man christened “the Pope of Trash,” American filmmaker, writer, and artist John Waters. When it comes to filth and bad taste, Waters literally wrote the book, explaining in Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste the importance of using your stylish and tasteful instincts to understand the value of good bad taste. “Bad taste is what entertainment is all about,” Waters writes, “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.” Applying this ethos to your personal fashion allows you to remain interested and invested in style, while opening your wardrobe far beyond what is generally deemed trendy or pretty. And, Waters’ many cult films certainly showcase how effective this can be.
“Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents – that is the key to fashion leadership”
“Filth is my politics, filth is my life!” exclaims Divine in Waters’ cult film Pink Flamingos (1972), declaring her investment in her coveted title, the “Filthiest Person Alive”. Filth is the highest accolade for the central characters in the world of Pink Flamingos, just as to be criminal and grotesque is to be beautiful in another of Waters’ most famous cult films, Female Trouble (1974). The reverence Waters’ characters have for filth is undoubtedly what makes them so influential and admired – as well as detested, of course. And this kind of bad taste isn’t difficult to achieve. Once you start getting into ugly fashion, you’ll realise pretty quickly how limited people’s ideas of what is apparently ‘tasteful’ are, and how easy it really is to tip over into ‘bad taste’. As Waters instructs, “Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents – that is the key to fashion leadership.”
Being deliberately trashy doesn’t just mean moving beyond traditional ideas of beauty and taste, but making an effort to reject them. But is studying in one of the world’s oldest universities, so closely interwoven with tradition and elitism, a totally inopportune environment for this? If anything, Cambridge is exactly where students should be getting a little filthier. Recognising (and perhaps becoming a little tired with) traditional ideas of taste and beauty is key to understanding the allure of abandoning them. Uniquely surrounded by historic architectural beauty and academic perfection, it’s especially important that we know how to celebrate filth.
“I’m in awe of really bad taste because I don’t have that freedom”
There are plenty of past examples of this desire to reject traditional standards of aesthetic judgement, and one certainly worth mentioning is camp. In camp taste, as Susan Sontag famously attempts to outline, the world is an aesthetic phenomenon evaluated not in terms of beauty but stylisation. Artifice, extravagance, and glamour is championed by camp where all seriousness fails. Sontag explains that camp doesn’t simply turn ordinary standards of good and bad taste on their heads, though. Instead, it offers a supplementary set of aesthetic standards for art – and life. Regardless of how difficult it is to outline what actually is (or isn’t) camp, this is what we must take from the camp sensibility – the possibility of fashioning your own set of aesthetic standards which dethrone the serious and traditional, without relying on any sense of superiority. Sontag explains that camp taste, like bad taste, “identifies with what it is enjoying”. Waters similarly emphasises that we should be looking up to bad taste: “I’m in awe of really bad taste because I don’t have that freedom.” An appreciative attitude towards the world’s eccentricities, in place of a perspective of superiority, characterises trashy style.
Cambridge's 2026 fashion resolutions
Condemning ugliness in fashion and refusing it in your wardrobe is only holding your sense of personal style back. There is no real reason not to create an aesthetic judgement basis where you decide what is beautiful and stylish. In fact, by rigorously dedicating yourself to beauty and perfection, you stray dangerously close to becoming terribly boring. Embracing a fashion of filth can be as simple as refusing this pressure – and having faith in your own bad taste!
