Fashion in Film Festival 2025 presents GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, a major UK-wide season exploring the relationship between fashion and nature through the lens of cinema in an era marked by escalating ecological crises

Spanning the late 19th century to present day, GROUNDED examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. With over 80 films from around the world, including rare screenings and UK premieres, the season offers a decentred perspective on themes such as production, disposal, hybridity, migration, social justice, and environmental harm. It also presents diverse narratives addressing ecological and geopolitical concerns while exploring imaginative spaces of poetry, comedy, beauty, joy, horror, and transgression.

The programme is co-curated by Marketa Uhlirova and Dal Chodha, with guest curators. It is possible with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery. Fashion in Film Festival is based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

website: www.fashioninfilm.com

ANIMATION SHORTS: States of Emergence:

Operating at the edges of reality and fantasy, serenity and grotesqueness, this programme harnesses animation as a language through which to express complex ideas about the relationships between bodies, objects and environments.

What does a body look like when it is turned inside out? And perfume, when materialised as a woodland substratum of abundant growth and decay? Might a plastic bag (arguably the most popular, if unwanted, fashion accessory) possess feelings and agency? Operating at the edges of reality and fantasy, serenity and grotesqueness, this programme harnesses animation as a language through which to express complex ideas about the entanglements of fashion and nature. Showcasing a variety of techniques, the films attend to moments in which physical bodies, plants and inanimate things push against and mould into each other. Through relentless adaptation and transformation, the films highlight the aliveness of both bodies and things, their shared nature as matter. Fashion here is conceptualised not only as the body’s textile covering but, more expansively, as its malleable surface.

Asparagus

USA, 1979. Dir. Suzane Pitt, 17min, English

Flora

Czechia, 1989. Dir. Jan Švankmajer, 1min

Moth

USA, 2019. Dir. Allison Schulnik, 4min

Plastic Bag

USA, 2020. Dir. Robin Frohardt, 8min

There is a Garden in My Head

Netherlands, 1987. Dir. Jacques Verbeek, Karin Wiertz, 4min

22 Light Years

USA, 2021. Dir. Janie Geiser, 14min

Trembled Blossoms

USA, 2008. Dir. James Lima, 5min

Wonderwood

UK, 2010. Dir. Brothers Quay, 3min