Fashion in Film Festival is 20 this year! To celebrate, our anniversary programme, The Party and the Guests, brings together rare screenings, live music, new sound commissions and discussions across London. Taking its title from Jan Němec’s elegant, unsettling 1966 film and giving it a celebratory turn, the season pays tribute to the art of conversation and to the collaborators and guests who have brought the festival to life over the past two decades.

The programme is dedicated to the late costume designer and stylist Roger K. Burton, who co-founded the festival in 2006 with Marketa Uhlirova and Christel Tsilibaris.

The Party and the Guests moves between early photographic and moving-image experiments, post-punk and queer countercultures, artists’ film, Black cultural resistance, and the art of disguise in a pre-First World War adventure serial. It brings together the work and contributions of artists, filmmakers, musicians, scholars, writers and curators, including Jarvis Cocker, Ahmir ‘Questlove‘ Thompson, John Maybury, William Klein, Étienne-Jules Marey, Martine Thoquenne, Nicola Lane, Vivian Ostrovsky & Soft Ware Prod., Laura McLean-Ferris, Inga Fraser, Stephen Horne, Georges Demenÿ, Karen Alexander, Juan Antonio Suárez, Émilie Cauquy, Richard Jones, Franziska and Matthias Radcliffe, Caroline Evans and Alistair O’Neill. The programme also premieres a new short film of the same name, created for the anniversary by artist Alex Schady.

Conceived as both a celebration and a reflection, the programme revisits the touchstones that have shaped the festival’s curatorial approach over two decades: archives, bodies, surfaces, disguise and style; designers, models and artists; and the spaces in which we fashion ourselves. Continuing to champion cinema as a shared public encounter, The Party and the Guests brings rarely seen works from the mid-nineteenth century to the present into dialogue with contemporary concerns. Across the season, fashion emerges as more than costume or spectacle: it becomes a material, sensory and narrative force through which bodies, social identities, political struggles and possible futures take shape.