This strand explores fashion and cinema’s shared capacity to become manifestations of the present. How can dress or fabric embody cinematic time? How can the rituals of producing fashion, wearing or fashioning oneself make time a tangible, felt entity? ‘The Present’ tackles perhaps the most complex set of questions through events, screenings and talks which place an emphasis on aspects of performance, duration and process. It connects the legacy of artist Annabel Nicolson’s legendary performance Reel Time with the work of late-20th century artists/filmmakers, and in a unique live show celebrates the hypnotic experimental tests made in the 1960s for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unrealised film The Inferno, in which the union between the filmic and the sartorial is made all the more striking by the unique temporality of a screen test performance.

The present is not a static moment, but one in which time rushes on, as it does in the brief passing of time as Agnès Varda’s heroine Cléo waits from 5 to 7 for crucial news, with her clothes changing according to the mood and time of day. Clothes can signal different times of day and accompanying rituals – take the surreal succession of costumed identities from dawn to deep night in Holy Motors, or the odyssey of a single dress suit through the layers of society and human drama in Tales of Manhattan. Not only can dress be a vehicle with which to travel through time, is can also measure time.