The organic versus the artificial body, rituals of dressing and undressing, posing and moving for the camera, self-fashioning and physical transformation – far from being the sole preserve of fashion, these themes have also been among key concerns for filmmakers and visual artists working with moving image. This film festival stages a dialogue between cinema, fashion and art as three distinct areas of creative practice bound by considerable affinities, overlaps and continuities. Highlighting a range of poetic sensibilities in showing dress and the adorned body in motion, the festival mixes up artist, avant-garde and underground cinema with early advertising and documentary films, as well as contemporary fashion films. With shorts by major artists, designers, filmmakers and image-makers, including Sonia Delaunay, José Rodriguez Soltero, Nick Knight, John Maybury, Charles Atlas, Iris van Herpen, Nino Oxilia, and Jacques Baratier shown alongside anonymous works, Layering presents an intricate spectrum of creative approaches and encounters. Through these, the festival aims to exorcise some of the polarizations and value judgements habitually made in debates about art and commerce, while at the same time contributing to such debate by exploring its nuances, especially in fashion image-making practice today.

Curated by Marketa Uhlirova, with Assistant Curator Caitlin Storrie.

This season is part of Archaeology of Fashion Film research project at University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.