The Fashion in Film Festival is back, and this year’s edition, titled Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, explores fashion’s complex relationship with the natural world, aiming to raise awareness of the ecological crises we are facing.

“The festival programme highlights cinema as a powerful multisensory experience that can expand our perception of the world,” says the festival’s co-curators Marketa Uhlirova and Dal Chodha. “It has the capacity to express intricate ideas about what fashion is and could be, and how the fashioned human body interacts with the non-human world.”

This year’s programme features over 80 films from more than 20 countries, showcased across 15+ venues throughout the UK, with works by acclaimed filmmakers such as Jacques Demy, Věra Chytilová, Jan Švankmajer, and John Akomfrah. The festival kicks off in London from May 20 to June 1, before continuing to the South West of England and Scotland in September.

With such an extensive and diverse selection on offer, we’ve curated a shortlist of must-see films screening across London over the next ten days.

The Dancing Fleece, 1950, dir. Frederick Wilson
Showing as part of a 60-minute programme inspired by the “dialectical montage of Soviet cinema”, The Dancing Fleece was commissioned by the National Wool Textile Export Corporation in 1950 and is a short film that exists in that rare intersection between promotional cinema and avant-garde performance. Starring the important British dancer Harold Turner, alongside the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, the film features costumes by the legendary designer Norman Hartnell.

The Dancing Fleece is showing as part of the Animal Matters programme at the Garden Cinema, Screen 3 on Sun, May 25th @ 18:30.

Colonial Threads: 3 Artist Films
Three short films by artists John Akomfrah, Shireen Seno and Osbert Parker are shown together as part of a programme exploring how “textiles and dress are directly implicated in histories of land, colonialism, migration and trade.”

Akomfrah’s Tropikos is a haunting reimagination of 16th-century encounters between British and African peoples during the dawn of the transatlantic slave trade. Seno’s To Pick a Flower draws parallels between the commodification and extraction of forests and the subjugation of people using archival images from the American occupation of the Philippines. Parker’s Timeline traces lines formed by nature and culture to symbolically evoke British migration as a ‘journey’ that is ever-evolving yet also anchored to the earth and soil.

Colonial Threads is showing at Barbican, Cinema 2 on Thurs May 22nd @ 19:00.

Nanook of the North, 1922, dir. Robert J. Flaherty
There’s a moment in Unzipped, one of the greatest ever fashion documentaries, where Isaac Mizrahi — having spent much of the film discussing Nanook of the North as the inspiration for his new collection — is handed the latest issue of WWD which reveals, on the cover, that the forthcoming Gaultier collection also draws heavily from the controversial 1922 docu-drama. A precursor to reality television’s so-called “structured reality”, Nanook was made with the backing of French fur company Revillon Frères and has become one of cinema’s most influential and controversial documentaries.

Nanoon of the North is showing at London College of Fashion on Weds May 28th @ 17:00. 

Veruschka: Poetry of a Woman, 1971, dir. Franco Rubartelli
The legendary model Veruschka appeared in this dreamy film by fashion photographer Franco Rubartelli in 1971, the soundtrack of which, by the legendary Ennio Morricone, has had a far greater legacy than the film itself. However, this is an incredibly rare chance to see his difficult-to-track-down film, which is being shown directly from a VHS.

Veruschka: Poetry of a Woman is being shown at The Horse Hospital on Sat May 24th @ 19:00.

Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne), 1970, dir. Jacques Demy
The third collaboration between Jacques Demy and Catherine Deneuve after Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), Peau d’Âne is the most fantastical of their trilogy of visually dazzling musical films. It draws from the French fairytale where a princess wears a donkey’s skin to escape the lecherous clutches of her royal father.

Peau d’Âne will be showing at the Rio Cinema on Sun June 1st @ 15:00.

Animation shorts: States of Emergence
A programme that gathers together animated short films that explore the relationship between fashion and nature, States of Emergence covers over 40 years and draws works from all around the world. A highlight will be the surreal Flora, a minute-long piece made by the Czech genius of animation Jan Švankmajer in 1989.

States of Emergence will be showing at the Rio Cinema on Sat May 31st @ 15:00.