Bringing together film screenings, talks, panel discussions and an exhibition, Fashion in Film Festival’s 10th anniversary season explores the fascinating connections between fashion, cinema and time.

Probing into four different (though often overlapping) conceptions of time – past, present, future, and dream – the festival programme asks what concrete manifestations of time fashion and clothing enable. What kind of chronologies and histories? What memories, echoes and ghostly shadows? What projections, visions or premonitions? Fashion’s own relation to time may be vital and intimate, but it is far from transparent. Film, the art of time passing, helps illuminate some of its complexities.

Few things indicate history to us as immediately as styles of dress – period films are often referred to as ‘costume dramas’ due to the role fashion plays in identifying past eras. At the same time, fashion is one of the most potent visual means through which film can break away from known reality and herald new worlds of tomorrow.

But dress and fabric can also embody the passage of time. From the earliest trick films to the dance numbers of contemporary Bollywood films, cinema can magically make clothing transform, appear, and disappear. Fashion in film has always been an important sign-posting device, deployed in multiple ways: to guide the viewer through time, to confuse, deceive, and disorient them, or even to dress the wounds of time. Examining the idea of clothing as a vehicle for representing time, Wearing Time also goes beyond this, foregrounding the sense of invoking the past, present and future by donning their clothing. Dress allows us to wear time, even as time wears us out.

The programme showcases a wide array of well-loved as well as neglected cinema features, experimental shorts, artist films, newsreels, industry films, documentaries and fashion films – from Alain Resnais’ enigmatic Last Year in Marienbad, to Richard Massingham’s wartime propaganda In Which We Live, to Nick Knight’s early fashion film Sleep and artists Jane and Louise Wilson’s response to Stanley Kubrick’s unmade film The Aryan Papers.