A Difference in Framing
For the Fashion in Film Festival, the “in” is crucial.
Founded in 2005 by curators Marketa Uhlirova and Christel Tsilibaris, with costume designer and archivist Roger K. Burton, the festival seeks to explore the means by which cinema has represented and shaped fashion, exploring different aspects and implications of costume and dress as interpreted by film. Based at Central Saint Martins (CSM), the festival is intended as a vehicle to explore different areas of research that emerge around contemporary fashion, while also welcoming new audiences into the field.
It is here where the titular ‘in’ comes into play. In contrast to festivals that specialise in fashion film, Fashion in Film is proudly eclectic – many of its films are not specifically about fashion, but nonetheless provoke reflection on the connections between garments and the world. Its programme spans documentaries, artist cinema and animation from around the world, combining the contemporary with the classics to offer new insights into fashion design, its surrounding culture, and wider political implications.
The festival’s most recent iteration, Layering: Fashion, Art, Cinema, was hosted before the Covid-19 pandemic in Miami in 2019 but, after a six-year hiatus, it is now returning to the UK with its eighth edition: Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature. Staged around the country from May to October 2025, the programme will explore connections between fashion, the human body, and the natural world, all set against the backdrop of the global climate crisis.
Co-curated by Uhlirova and Dal Chodha – a writer and editor, as well as pathway leader of the BA Fashion Communication: Image and Promotion course at CSM – the festival aims to open discussions onto its theme that extend beyond reiteration of the environmental damage and labour exploitation caused by mass production of fast fashion. Instead, Chodha and Uhlirova hope that the films they have selected present a more multifaceted, complex picture of fashion’s relationship with the body, landscape, systems and environment.
The festival is broken into five themes – ‘From the Ground Up’, ‘Uncommon Ground’, ‘Otherground’, ‘Shaky Ground’ and ‘Ancestral Ground’ – which touch respectively on material extraction, inequitable labour relations, metamorphosis and fantasy, ecology, and re-enchantment of the world. Films that already have a popular UK audience, such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) rub shoulders with less well-known works from around the world. Dust to Dust (2024) sees fashion designer Yuima Nakazato explore Nairobi’s Gikomba Market, the world’s largest hub for discarded clothes; Utama (2022) illuminates life and climate in Bolivia’s arid Altiplano; Donkey Skin (1970) delves into fur, transformation and animality; Youth (Spring) (2023) examines relationships amongst a group of Chinese textile workers; and Animal Matters (1910-1950) groups a series of short films that mine the tension between fashion’s fantastical potential with its industrial realities.
Across the festival, Uhlirova and Chodha hope to present a vision of fashion that is layered, contradictory and engaged with the world around it. Below, they discuss their curation of the festival and their desire to present a vision of fashion’s relationship with nature that can offer more than pessimism.
Disegno How did the festival begin?
Marketa Uhlirova When we started working on it in 2005, we were the first festival of this kind in Europe and North America. There wasn't anything like this. Actually, we’re still different from most of the other ones out there.
Disegno In what way?
Marketa We are a festival with a strong curatorial focus, so the seasons respond to research questions rather than the current output in the industry. From the beginning we had to make choices about what we would investigate. Christel and I are art historians and curators and our collaborator Roger K. Burton has a background in costume design and is a great fan of a wide range of cinema including underground and B movies. That colours a lot of what we do and how we do it.
Disegno Dal, how did you get involved?
Dal Chodha Marketa and I have been colleagues at Central Saint Martins for a long time. The festival is part of her role here as a researcher and academic, whereas I'm engaged more in the running of the BA pathway. At the end of 2023, there was a casual discussion where I just asked when the next festival was happening. By nature I tend to encourage people to do things and, as a tutor, you're constantly supporting people to carry on doing what they’re doing, even though it may be incredibly difficult or sometimes feel a little pointless. Marketa already had the idea of doing another season in the back of her mind, so I sort of became a conduit and comrade on it.
Marketa I think he has regretted it ever since.
Dal And yet here we are! I saw my role as being about editorialising the programme. We're so used to talking to the same audience, whether that’s within film, fashion or design, but this was an exciting opportunity to expand that quite dramatically. What would your average cinema goer want to see, and how can we use that moment where they're committing to sitting in a room in the dark for an hour and a half to try and get them to think differently about important subjects? We found a slight aversion to discussions around the environment. Particularly within fashion, it can often feel like you're being lectured to, or you're being told off for wanting to engage in the discipline. We thought that, actually, now is the time to use this framework of the festival – which is beautiful, important, well made cinema – to talk about fashion, dress and the climate crisis in different ways. People know what they’re going to be told when they attend a lecture about fashion and the climate, or when they watch a documentary about these issues – it’s going to confirm their anxieties or suspicions or fears. What I love about our programme is that all of that is still there, of course, but we're using cinema differently.
Marketa We were concerned about presenting the issues in a way that would feel fresh and suggest imaginative ways into the material. We wanted to give the films the space to speak for themselves, and allow some joy and beauty into the programme. Film is a kind of language, although not in the linguistic sense, and it has a power to grab people through its affective, emotional and sensory devices, as well as through its storytelling. So that's why Dal and I came together really well – because we’re both very interested in the power of language and visual expression. But our funder, the BFI, was also encouraging us towards expanding our remit beyond academia and creative industries.
Disegno That's a tricky thing – so many initiatives within different design disciplines say they want to be public facing and engage audiences outside of the echo chamber, but it’s rarely done.
Dal The job of curation doesn't end once we've decided what films we're going to show – we’re now really engaged in making sure that we have the audiences, and that's audiences plural. These are things that a lot of us often take for granted, but we want to actually think about who is in the room, who's taking up space, and who is using the opportunity to watch this film, and have this conversation? We're trying to get fashion people to think about the issues and also trying to expand upon some of those narratives that are so well-trodden in our news streams and social media feeds about how damaging the fashion industry can be, or how dehumanising it can be, or how wasteful. We know all of these negative things about the creative industries, and the impact they have, but how can we look at that in a slightly different way?
Disegno Did you know from the start that your topic would be fashion in relation to nature?
Marketa It was something I was less keen on doing initially because it felt too obvious. But as soon as we started meeting, we began having lively conversations about how to make it feel engaging and exciting.
Dal What has been encouraging for me is that although we weren’t really looking at the calendar of other cultural institutions, in the last couple of months we’ve noticed that the British Library has its Unearthed exhibition going on and there’s an exhibition at the Barbican opening in September called Dirty Looks that is about decay and clothing. It does feel like the season is contributing to a bigger conversation in the creative arts, with institutions thinking, perhaps in more sophisticated, nuanced ways, about these issues. I also love the idea that all of the films we are showing are just really great films. We're wrapping them in this story, but they’re also just films we love.
Marketa We have chosen a number of films that were really not that obvious given the theme, but we have allowed them to shape our thinking. We've come up with five curatorial strands, and some of those were defined by the films themselves. To put it simply, we wanted for film to teach us something fresh about the connections between fashion, the human body and nature.
Disegno How will those sub-themes drive the festival?
Marketa All our strands have the word “ground" in them, obviously revolving around Grounded, the title of the season. It so happens that “ground” is such rich terrain for thinking around not just the environment, but also, more broadly, our communication. We use the word “ground” in expressions and idioms on a daily basis and it became a challenge for us to interrogate them in relation to our programme. Take, for example, the expression “common ground”: when you look at the geopolitical relations of the fashion industry and the climate emergency, there’s not much “common ground”: hence the name of our strand ‘Uncommon Ground’.
Dal We were also interested in this idea of ‘Shaky Ground’, which is where we've housed a lot of films that speak in a more direct way to how industrial fashion production is damaging. That’s something people already know, but it felt key to look at the human stories around that. We've centred films that have been made by people from places where clothes are being produced and have tried to get as far away from presenting a Western point of view as we can.
Marketa In Utama, it's interesting that you barely see any fashion production. I think there's one scene of a woman spinning yarn from the llamas that she and her husband keep. With films like this, we wanted to gently challenge what we mean when we say “fashion”. The films don't have to be about fashion for them to speak to this theme. This film is about a particular livelihood in a specific region in Bolivia, and it is about what precedes the making of cloth and clothing. It's important to consider fashion within the holistic picture of the Earth.
Disegno You’ve spoken in material you’ve published around the festival about trying to take curating back to its original meaning of tending and nurturing new strands of thought, and your desire to provide some hope for the future. Why did that sense of optimism feel important?
Marketa The current state of the environment, and the way humans plunder it, is quite bleak, but losing all hope cannot be the solution. Much of the problem is structural – in Western societies we are conditioned to think of our environment as just a resource – but it is a resource from which we are emotionally disconnected. So it felt important to us to look to creativity in order to connect to stories and images that enable a shift in perception.
Dal Generally, being a doomsayer is not in my nature, but I have also seen the effect that negativity has had on generations of students: year after year, they are becoming more anxious. It’s sad that young people feel as if they’re not allowed to have a creative output without it being immediately weighed down by social and political responsibilities. That doesn't mean we don't want them to be conscious of those things, but some of the lightness around creative practice, particularly in fashion, has gone. We were keen to throw some of that lightness back in and allow people to have fun with it. There’s a naive idea that you can do things in a way that won't have any environmental impact, which is complicated. I’m OK with encouraging students to work in the most ethical, conscious way possible, but I’m not telling them not to do things which is what often comes out of conversations around fashion and the environment. Telling them “Don't do it. Do something else,” isn’t going to give us a very beautiful future. If we're telling a young generation to do something else, we'll end up with a lot of politicians but have no beautiful films, no images, no art.
Interview Oli Stratford
Images Courtesy of Film in Fashion
Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature opens in London on 20 May and runs until October 2025. Full details of the programme and schedule may be found here.