Fashion in Film Festival 2025: Why We’re Grounded in This

Fashion has always been about more than clothes, it’s a language, a mirror, a way of shaping how we see ourselves and the world. This autumn, it’s also a way of asking urgent questions about our place in nature.

The Fashion in Film Festival’s 2025 edition, GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, is taking over independent cinemas across the UK from September to October. After a London run earlier this summer, the BFI-backed programme lands in Glasgow, Bristol, Plymouth, Dundee, Exeter and Inverness, with more than 30 films spanning early cinema, contemporary documentary, experimental shorts and lush, strange visions that will leave you rethinking the seams between fashion and the natural world. Fashion Re-Imagined, one of our favourite films starring Amy Powney's quest to create the most sustainable fashion brand, is still a favourite, and we're hoping to find new delights.

What’s to love? For one, it’s not just about clothes looking good on screen, it’s about cinema as a sensory experience that can express tangled ideas: fashion as both shield and bridge, beauty and excess, joy and consternation. Co-curators Marketa Uhlirova and Dal Chodha have tended to this selection “like gardeners tend to trees,” cultivating new branches of thought (and, hopefully, some hope for the future).

Expect programmes like Sacred Transmission, where gods and spirits haunt the landscapes of film; Ready-to-Wear Landscapes, which dives into waste colonialism and the life cycle of clothing; and We Are All Chimeras, exploring the porous boundaries between human, animal, myth and machine. There’s also Kosai Sekine’s Dust to Dust, tracing fabric from Kenyan landfills to Parisian runways, and Jodie Mack’s kaleidoscopic The Grand Bizarre.

Screenings will pop up at cultural hubs including Watershed Bristol, Dundee Contemporary Arts (in partnership with V&A Dundee), Exeter Phoenix, Eden Court Inverness, and Glasgow Film Theatre, plus a community screening at Garnet Hill Multicultural Centre, ensuring the conversation reaches beyond the usual festival crowd.

It’s a reminder that fashion isn’t just something we wear, it’s something we make, unmake, and imagine together. And sometimes the best way to see that clearly is in the flicker of a projector, surrounded by strangers, watching beauty wrestle with the world.

UK-wide screenings: 5th September – 25th October 2025

Venues include Glasgow Film Theatre, Watershed Bristol, Dundee Contemporary Arts (with V&A Dundee), Exeter Phoenix, Plymouth Arts Centre, Eden Court Inverness, and more.

Full programme & tickets: fashioninfilm.com