Fashion in Film festival returns exploring the complex intersections between fashion and the environment.
Fashion in Film festival, a non-profit arts organisation based at UAL Central Saint Martins, is returning with its BFI-backed 2025 edition Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – a landmark programme that uses cinema to explore the complex relationship between fashion and nature, and raise awareness of the nuanced ecological crises that we’re facing as a society.
With over 80+ film screenings spanning the early 20th-century to the present moment, Grounded reveals fashion as both a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. Across five curatorial themes - From the Ground Up, Shaky Ground, Uncommon Ground, Pagan Ground and Otherground - Grounded explores the limits of natural resources, climate change and the impact the fashion industry has had on global societies, as well as the ways fashion and nature have long existed together in indigenous practices, folklore and fantasy.
The programme features films from over 20 countries with celebrated filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Ogawa collective, Jacques Demy, Věra Chytilová, Jan Švankmajer, Mark Jenkin, John Akomfrah, Melanie Bonajo and Janie Geiser. Highlights include a special showcase of silent films soundtracked by a live musical score from Musarc, several UK premieres — including Alexandra Gulea’s Maia: A Portrait with Hands (2024) and Kosai Sekine’s Dust to Dust (2023), which tracks the lifecycle of fabric from the landfills of Kenya to Parisian runways — as well as archival restorations like The Dancing Fleece, a charming ballet fashion film commissioned by the British wool industry in 1950 and a very rare screening of Ogawa collective’s Raising Silkworms from 1977.
The festival will take place from 20 May - 1 June at legendary cinema venues across London – including Barbican Cinema, Garden Cinema, Genesis and Rio Cinema among others – before continuing on to the South West of England and Scotland throughout September, in iconic venues like the Glasgow Film Theatre, Watershed and Plymouth Arts Centre, attracting 7000+ audience members.
FULL PROGRAMME AVAILABLE HERE