London Fashion Film Festival: When fashion becomes a story

And it's probably just diversity that I've appreciated most.

Fashion here was not simply something to wear or observe, but it became a means through which to tell the body, identity, origins and relationship with others. Some courts were more related to photography and aesthetics, others had a much stronger narrative component, others still seemed almost visual experiments. Together they showed how difficult, and perhaps also useless, to try to give a single definition of fashion film.

There was a strong cultural diversity, but also a diversity of emotions and sources of inspiration. Fashion could be born from love for one’s body, from the desire to tell it without necessarily transforming it or hiding it, but also from the encounter with different cultures from one’s own. Fabrics, colors, movements and images became so part of a language that went beyond the simple dress.

It is also nice to see artificial intelligence give space. At a time when its use in the creative world inevitably continues to create discussions, seeing it inserted in a festival dedicated to image and fashion opened another possibility: to consider it also as a new visual tool to experiment with. Not necessarily something that replaces creativity, but something that can become part of the conversation about how we imagine and build new images.

The feeling, in the end, was to have spent an afternoon entering for a few hours in the mind of fashion. Not the one of the catwalks seen from the outside, but the one that comes first: the idea, inspiration, body, photography, movement and then the way that all this is transformed into an image.

And that's where cinema and fashion started to get confused.

Perhaps this was also the most interesting part of the experience. Being there didn't mean just meeting people interested in fashion. I have known passionate people of photography, others who work or want to work in film production, people interested in building the image and the way a story can be told even in a few minutes.

Because eventually a fashion film remains cinema. It can last a few minutes, it may not have dialogues and can be born around a dress, body or image, but it must still be able to transmit something.

The London Fashion Film Festival reminded me of this: behind fashion there is not only a desire to create something beautiful. There are people, cultures, bodies, ideas and stories. And maybe cinema is one of the most interesting ways to make them meet all in the same space.