The London-based 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 programme asks what concrete manifestations of time fashion and clothing enable. What memories, echoes, and ghostly shadows? 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. 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. 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 goes beyond this, foregrounding the sense of invoking the past, present and future by donning its clothing. Dress allows us to wear time, even as time wears us out.