How This Film Festival Is Grounding Fashion in Nature on the Big Screen

We're all well aware of fashion's tempestuous relationship with nature and Mother Earth but if you've been living under a rock, we have no doubt there are plenty of documentaries to enlighten you on the subject - no matter which streaming platforms you subscribe to. Which is why this season's latest iteration of the Fashion in Film Festival, Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature, co-curated by SHOWstudio contributors Dal Chodha and Marketa Uhlirova moves away from didacticism and towards celebration, rooting the subject in 'fantasy, humour, magic and joy' this summer between May and September, 2025.

SHOWstudio has always championed fashion film as a radical space of enquiry; a lens through which image, ideology, and aesthetics collide. We even interviewed Uhlirova in 2008 for the festival's second ever iteration If Looks Could Kill: Cinema's Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence which offered a darker slant on the concept of fashion in cinema, dissecting the unholy marriage of fashion and crime by examining strands of thought. Following in this tradition by framing nature not as idyllic escape, but as a politically charged terrain the 2025 programme for Grounded is as expansive as ever and includes cinematic interrogations on the subject by way of films such as Lotte Reiniger and Frederick Wilson's 1950 animation The Dancing Fleece, a 1977 Japanese documentary titled The Magino Village Story: Raising Silkworms and even the rarely screened 1971 film Veruschka, Poetry of a Woman by Franco Rubartelli - a Chodha favourite.

Enough with the anxious threads many are all too keen to trace between the fashion industry and an ecological one. Grounded instead invites us to question the parallels between dress and landscapes as metaphors, negotiating the connection between human bodies and the environment that surrounds them. This is not a return to Eden. This is fashion stripped bare, rewilded, re-rooted.

Christina Donoghue: How did you decide on the films included in this year’s programme?

Marketa Uhlirova: Our past festival programmes generally began with a single film, a film pairing, or a film combined with a thinker whose perspective we were interested in. There needed to be a kernel from which everything evolved. Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature was born from a negative, a rejection. The ideas about what may be included were initially quite uncertain, but we did have a very strong gut feeling that we didn’t want to show the fashion-nature relationship exclusively through documentary exposés of the fashion industry, of which there are now many. We felt these documentaries tend to look at the problem through a Westernised lens, in turn producing quite a specific idea of how fashion and nature interact, which is limiting to all parties involved. We were interested in films that expanded our understanding of the theme, that revealed something important about it without it necessarily being the main focus. We turned to fantasy, humour, magic and joy to balance out the feelings of anxiety and hopelessness that are necessarily present when thinking about humans plundering the environment.

Dal Chodha: I looked back to see how long we have been working on this. We began creating the list in the autumn of 2023! I was surprised it was that long ago as the process has had a real ebb and flow. We're aware the theme we are unpacking is very broad, and people (particularly those in fashion) come to it with a very distinct set of ideas about what they think we want to say about the issues of the climate crisis and fashion’s complicity within it. But we’re not an echo chamber – we need to open up these readings even more, to sit within the complexity and also explore broader ideas about what it means to create and to ‘use’ a resource. We have avoided anything that is didactic, or sermonising. The power of cinema is that when it is done well, you leave the theatre with a new understanding; that’s the hope. We arranged films into themes and then re-positioned these many times over - moving them around on various Google Docs, pieces of paper, email threads and text messages combined. It was a very organic, sprawling process as you can imagine. The curatorship has been hacking it all back, to make sense of it and clear the way for some nuance.

MU: At the same time, we were having conversations with writers and curators who focus on topics such as vegetal cinema, cinema and ecology, or the roles of textiles and craft in indigenous practices. These conversations became such a crucial part of our process, and we are happy that we can amplify these plural voices and ideas through the format of the festival.

CD: How did you and the rest of the team decide on the different strands of this year’s programming, from ‘From the Ground Up’ to ‘Otherground’?

MU: As we researched more films, our bigger themes began to emerge quite organically – initially as a basic system for us to understand what we were dealing with. It made sense we captured all the different but interconnected aspects of how fashion as an industry and the natural environment intersect in the real world – issues around making and industrial production, consumption and disposal, and their human and environmental costs. But there were other ideas the films were opening up that are less obvious but seemed just as important to grasp, to do with ways in which dress and cinema negotiate the connection (and separation) of human bodies and the natural environment, or to do with how different species can coexist and collaborate, or with dress and landscapes as metaphors... This is where experimental cinema, animation, trick film, fairytale and horror came to their own. In terms of the names of our strands, Grounded as an overall title came long before the strands: it was intuitive and came from a need to anchor fashion and pull it from its lofty heights back towards the ground – suggesting something trodden on and down-to-earth, but also something rich and vital for life. The strands then emerged serendipitously, through wordplay, there was something quite profound about the realisation that the word ‘ground’ plays such a crucial part in English language, being present in so many idioms.

CD: What advantage does cinema have over other mediums in showcasing fashion?

Mu: I think cinema makes us notice and experience in unique ways – though, in saying unique, I don’t mean to make a single claim for the many different moving image media technologies and how we encounter moving images today, from cinemas to art galleries to our small screens. But, going back to Dal’s point about leaving with a new understanding, and feeling transformed, cinema has the power to make us see and feel something as we have never seen or felt before. For example, it can select and amplify a detail – a face or a pocket. And it can show the most fascinating subtlety in relationships. Film makes us feel and understand things – including clothes – and how these things relate to other things or living beings. Film can tell compelling stories or, just as importantly, show something. It can mess with our perception. In our programme, we ask of film to reveal something fresh and unexpected about how fashion and nature meet. We hope to provoke an interrogation of the very concepts of fashion and nature.

CD: Do you have a personal favourite included in the Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature programme?

DC: I am really happy we have found a way to screen Franco Rubartelli’s 1971 Veruschka: Poetry of a Woman. I knew of it from having a book of photographs of Veruschka painted as trees and plants and buildings; she was very interested in body painting in the 1970s. I then searched and found that she has collaborated with Franco on this film – there is one bad print on YouTube and then to my surprise, Marketa had a VHS tape of the film in a drawer in her office, which she bought on a whim years ago! We have been searching for a print, and have been to most of the Italian film archives, in vain. I am so glad we have worked out a way of showing it – which has not been easy. We were in touch with Franco but he was not able to get a better print to us in time. There is something arresting in the fuzzy quality of the print; film is a material that ages, wears out and sometimes even ‘dies’. We were drawn to the fragility of the video image, which we will be showing at The Horse Hospital on 24 May.

MU: I am also thrilled that so many artists and animators have accepted our invitation to show their films in this context. Their work opens up new worlds and makes for a much richer proposition. Personally, I am particularly excited about our collaboration with the experimental choir Musarc and EYE Film Museum’s silent film curator Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi. We approached Musarc to create a new soundscape for a programme of pre-WWI silent films that link women to flowers and insects. Musarc were asked to highlight the profound strangeness of these films, which show women to be like blooms or butterflies: sensuous and delicate but also dangerously attractive. Musarc’s first rehearsal the other day sounded very promising, combining spoken word with playing instruments, singing, humming and insect sounds.

CD: ‘Fashion’ and ‘nature’ have always been seen as very separate entities, by both industries respectively; why do you think more people are starting to join the dots between them?

DC: A lot of people have done important work raising awareness of these issues over the last two decades so I do think now we are starting to see some change. Not a huge amount, but some. We can be very impatient at times and I think we need to recognise how far we have come in relation to how we talk and think about consumption in just the last 15 years alone. But so often the conversation is cut short, or the onus is directed to the powerless. We wanted to show films that illustrate the connections between us and the ground we walk on; it is a simple and direct idea that gets lost in the politics of life. Working in education, we are facing this moral question every day: why do this? Why add to the issues? But we cannot eradicate artistic practice altogether – we want to encourage people to do it better.

Don't miss Grounded: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature runs, taking place from 20 May until September, 2025 at cinema venues across the capital including Barbican Cinema, Garden Cinema, Genesis, Rio Cinema and more. For the full programme, click here.