What to watch at London’s Fashion in Film Festival

When Dal Chodha stopped Marketa Uhlirova in the corridor at Central Saint Martins (CSM) last year, he didn’t expect the exchange to lead to curating an entire film festival. ‘I just sort of said, “Well, what’s happening with the Fashion in Film Festival? You haven’t posted anything on Instagram for ages”,’ says Chodha. ‘I think I might’ve inserted myself in.’

‘You did,’ Uhlirova replies. ‘You said, “Let’s do something.” It’s been a very organic collaboration.’

The conversation between the pair, both tutors at CSM – Uhlirova is an art historian who founded the Fashion in Film Festival back in 2005, and Chodha is a writer, consultant and Wallpaper* contributing editor – spiralled into a year-long rabbit hole of research, film-watching, and debate that culminated in the 2025 edition of the festival, ‘Grounded’. Taking nature as its theme, the programme uses cinema as a lens to explore the complex entanglements between fashion and the natural world.

While the industry’s environmental impact might seem like an obvious focus for the programme, the pair have taken the curation down more expansive and surprising roads. Rather than using research to reinforce what they already knew, their curation was shaped by perspective-shifting discoveries – from salvaged VHS films to beautiful animations and sobering documentaries. Spanning from the early 20th century to the present moment, the resulting programme groups 80 films into five thematic strands that traverse not only ecological and geopolitical themes, but also stories of visual splendour, comedy, horror and transgression.

‘I’m quite tired of the ways the fashion industry talks about climate challenges,’ says Chodha. ‘It often lacks any sort of nuance, hope or positivity. I think this is where we had the chance to really just open up that conversation and try to find other ways in. Obviously, we found the films through this lens [of nature], but then also allowed [them] to kind of expand that lens – to offer us new avenues of thinking.’

With screenings, panel talks, and live performances taking place at the Barbican, BFI Southbank, ICA, and the Horse Hospital throughout this week, here Uhlirova and Chodha select five highlights from this year’s festival that are not to be missed.

Five to watch from the Fashion in Film Festival 2025

Dust to Dust (2024)

Dal Chodha: Dust to Dust is a documentary film about the only Japanese couturier currently showing at Paris Fashion Week, Yuma Nakazato. He travels to Nairobi in Kenya, which is now the number one African country to receive clothing waste from Western countries. We see him buy bales of discarded clothing, take them back to Japan, and process them using a new machine to make fabric, which he then shows at Paris Fashion Week. It’s not uncommon to see documentaries like that from a sort of BBC white European angle, but the fact that it was coming from Japan added a different philosophy on textile waste. He comments in ways that we felt captured the complexity and the ambiguity around these issues, and that nuance really appealed to us. It’s exciting to [be showing the UK premiere], and Alex Musembi, who is part of one of the organisations on the ground in Kenya, will be in conversation with me and Jawara Alleyne and Tamsin Blanchard.

UK premiere and panel at Central Saint Martins, LVMH Lecture Theatre, 20 May 2025, 6.30pm, book tickets here.

Into the Garden of Chimerical Delights (Various, 1897–1913)

Marketa Uhlirova: This was a collaboration with the Film Museum in Amsterdam and curator Ali Frongenis. Chimerical Delights is a programme of shorts made before the First World War. They examine a post-Victorian obsession with women as flowers and insects, which in this period of cinema was explored by filmmakers through the genre of the trick film, where a magician would conjure women to emerge from flowers or as butterflies from cocoons. A kind of eroticism is present in them, where women are portrayed as somehow dangerous, just like a flower can be quite erotic if represented in a certain way. We’re juxtaposing them with films where women walk through flower fields or smell flowers or pick flowers. We approached an experimental choir based in London to try and help us tease out some of the weirdness and strangeness of these films that might otherwise get lost, if you just had a piano accompaniment. The choir highlights the lyricism and the sensuality of these amazing images, which have been restored in colour by the archives.

Panel, screening and live choir at Barbican, Cinema 1, 30 May 2025, 7pm, book tickets here.

Veruschka: Poetry of a Woman (1971)

Dal Chodha: This has been such a hilarious and wonderful labour of love for us both in various ways. Veruschka is a model that lots of people will know or recognise. She’s still alive, lives in Paris. Years ago, I remember discovering a period of her work, in the 1970s, where she was very heavily into body art [and] would paint herself like her environment. Marketa said, ‘You know, I think they made a film of it too.’ We eventually were led to this. Someone had put a really poor-quality version on YouTube, and then weirdly, Marketa one day got out this VHS and threw it on the desk and said, ‘I bought this randomly years ago.’ It’s kind of a long-form essay where nothing particularly happens, but we see Veruschka having this argument with her boyfriend, driving through the Italian rural countryside. In the film, she muses on this idea of being a commodity. It has these amazing vignettes where she is painted like a plant or an animal and she’s rolling around in trees. We’re showing it in the Horse Hospital, which aptly has this 1970s kind of energy to it as a space.

Screening at The Horse Hospital, 24 May 2025, 7pm, book tickets here.

Youth (Spring) (2023)

Dal Chodha: Youth is part of a trilogy of films from director Wang Bing. What we loved is this gonzo, fly-on-the-wall energy. You’re just watching these young textile workers, who are based outside Shanghai and make children’s clothes, living their lives. What it doesn’t necessarily do is go, ‘Look at these poor people who work so you can buy a two-pound T-shirt for your child.’ It doesn’t do that. It allows them to just be human beings who are falling in love, eating, arguing, moving home, hating their parents, and all of the things that most of us have felt at some point in our lives. So it’s a really interesting viewpoint on the people who make these clothes that we buy for very little money. Perversely, as a tutor, what I also liked is that it’s quite a commitment for the viewer – it’s three hours long. I think so much of culture has just gone towards making things as easy as possible and I am quite anti that. There are other exposés on the fashion industry that tackle these themes. But I think the temporality of this film makes it something extraordinary.

Screening at Garden Cinema, Screen 3, 25 May 2025, 2pm, book tickets here.

Animal Matters (Various, 1910–1950)

Marketa Uhlirova: Animal Matters is a selection of short films shot between the beginning of the 20th century and 1950, exploring animals as a resource in fashion. In the silent period, the Pathé company and the Gomor company released newsreels using material from around the world. Fashion was a really important kind of mainstay in these newsreels, often being the less serious but the most pleasurable item shown at the end. A lot of [the examples] showcase really beautiful animal products – feathers, skins and snakeskin shoes. We took the idea of the Soviet montage, which becomes important in this period, to create this kind of visceral collision between different views, so that you are kind of forced to synthesise them. We focused on the industrial, the hunting of animals and stripping of skins and stuff like that, and the glamourisation of these materials in fashion. We end on a fun note with a film called The Dancing Fleas that has been in my archive for years and has now been beautifully restored by the British Film Institute. It’s a colourful ballet of sheep who perform the production of woollen textiles, from shearing all the way through to the finished garment.

Screening and live music at Garden Cinema, Screen 3, 25 May 2025, 6.30pm, book tickets here.

Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglement with Nature takes place at various locations in London from 20 May – 1 June 2025.