This strand highlights cinema as an important platform for fast-forwarding us into design futures, and the different approaches costume designers especially have taken to envisioning these. To give a concrete form to one’s idea of the future involves taking an imaginative leap that crosses the limits of the familiar. But in design terms, this also requires great resourcefulness and creativity in re-using elements that already exist, giving them a new sensibility.

For the future to speak to us, we must be able to recognise ourselves in it; it has to show itself as a strange version of the present. ‘Futureness’ can be flamboyant or restrained but it has to be simultaneously convincing and ‘out of this world’. Since the future is yet to be realised, our vision of it, above all, reflects a view of our present: what it lacks, what might be possible and also our desire for something different.