Fashion in Film Festival: What Does it Mean to Dress as the Planet Burns?

I’m sitting in the darkened hush of the Central Saint Martins screening theatre. There’s a quiet, collective anticipation in the air as the first images of Dust to Dust (2024) flicker to life. On screen, Tokyo-based designer Yuima Nakazato clambers over the mountainous textile waste of Nairobi’s Gikomba Market, the world’s largest hub for secondhand clothing. The sheer scale of fast fashion’s global afterlife rendered in heaps of synthetic detritus is staggering. Later, we watch him transform these discarded garments into couture garments shown on catwalks in Paris.

The screening marks the UK premiere of Dust to Dust, a new documentary by Kôsai Sekine, and the beginning of the eighth edition of the Fashion in Film Festival, titled Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature. Curated by fashion theorist and writer Dal Chodha and cultural historian Marketa Uhlirova, both tutors at Central Saint Martins, the programme spans over 80 films across 16 venues in London, the South West, and Scotland. But this is no glossy celebration of style. Instead, Grounded asks an urgent question surrounding fashion, the second largest industry pollutant in the world: what does it mean to dress while the planet burns?

The idea of entanglement is central to the curators’ vision. “Entanglement suggests that none of us are separate from nature – or from fashion,” says Chodha. “We’re all implicated. There’s often a binary framing around conversations about fashion sustainability – humans versus nature, for example – and that’s something we wanted to move away from, especially in the context of fashion, where things can feel quite distanced or isolated.”

The festival isn’t about providing answers or solutions to this global problem, but to create grounds for reflection, and through the medium of film, explore the ambiguity and complexity of this subject matter. The festival presents an array of archival gems, experimental shorts, animations, and artist films, as the programme unpacks the messy, layered relationship between bodies, materials, and ecosystems.

“People just want ease these days, understandably,” Chodha laughs. “Friends have said, ‘Can you just tell me one film to watch?’ And of course, I can. But there’s something telling in that response and this craving for a packaged answer. A film that says: here’s the issue, here’s how you should feel; that’s exactly what we didn’t want to do. We were really aware of the existing language and narratives that circulate in these spaces – especially in activism – and how they can become echo chambers.”

Indeed, many films in the festival resist simple interpretation. One film screening is Veruschka: Poetry of a Woman (1971), a rarely seen film made in collaboration between photographer Franco Rubartelli and model and performance artist Veruschka von Lehndorff. Screened on VHS with Rubartelli’s permission, the film unfolds as a surreal meditation on beauty, identity, and nature. Scored by Ennio Morricone, with vocals by Edda Dell’Orso, it follows Veruschka as she becomes a rock, a flower, and eventually transforms into a feline body painted and camouflaged against snowy cliffs and sunlit fields. Another film screening is Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (1970), which uses fur to explore questions surrounding how fashion can defy social norms. The first instalment of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy (2023), Spring is a quietly powerful documentary filmed over five years, that follows young textile workers in Zhili, China as they navigate love, labour, and life under capitalism. 

As co-curator Uhlirova explains, “Cinema, especially art film and animation, does openness and ambiguity especially well – that’s why they became important to this programme. They embrace complexity and create space for the viewer to enter. And that’s powerful.” Film demands attention in a world of hyper-speed fashion cycles and endless online social media scrolling. “Back in the 1920s, the movie palaces were built as these grand spaces that resembled cathedrals,” she says. “The opulent architecture suggested they were fundamentally sacred spaces, and cinema was seen as transformative, almost spiritual. With a bit of hyperbole, you could say people went to films the way they’d go to pray. They were seduced by them, deeply drawn in, and it was a collective experience.”

After most screenings in the festival, the lights come up and reflective conversations begin. Following Dust to Dust, a thought-provoking panel discussion takes place between Africa Collect Textiles co-founder Alex Musembi, designer Jawara Alleyne, journalist Tamsin Blanchard, and Dal Chodha as they reflect on fashion’s structural violence. “Fashion is about design solutions,” says Alleyne. “And we haven’t been doing this for a long time. I’m not a sustainable designer. Rather, I design in a sustainable way.”

Grounded reframes fashion not as an empty spectacle, but as a practice woven from soil, sweat, class, history, and culture. The festival seeks to break down barriers, both artistic and economical: “Cinema in a city like London can be expensive. Price is a real barrier,” says Chodha. “We’ve worked closely with each venue to make sure the festival is as accessible as possible.” By bringing together filmmakers, fashion students, artists, and activists, the year’s Fashion in Film festival creates a rare space for collective, urgent rethinking. And in a media landscape saturated with fleeting aesthetics, the festival invites us not just to look at fashion, but to feel its weight.

Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature takes place in various venues across London until 1 June 2025.