Films make powerful fashion statement

The Victorian Fashion Festival will come to Geelong this month through two documentaries exploring woolly wonders and the consequences of clothing.
In Yarn Icelandic filmmakers Una Lorenzen, Heather Millard and Thordur Jonsson meet the artists redefining knitting and crochet.
The film weaves together wool graffiti artists, circus performers, and structural designers bringing yarn out of the house and into the world.
The visually striking film looks at the women making a creative stance while building one of modern art’s hottest trends.
“To me, crochet is my language,” says one artist in the film’s trailer, “it’s the way I communicate with my audience.”
Crochet-covered models and woolly-tailed mermaids feature in this colourful film, which airs at the National Wool Museum on Wednesday 8 March.
Former Blur bassist turned cheesemaker, Alex James, looks at the enormous human and environmental costs of the clothing industry in Slowing Down Fast Fashion.
“In Britain, we discard a million tonnes of clothes a year,” James says during the film, “and replace them with two tonnes of new clothing.
“Fifty per cent of what we cast aside ends up in land fill.”
James talks to designers, activists, and high street brands and finds a thirst for change as consumers start to look at clothes the way they look at food.
The film seeks to provide solutions for the disposable approach to style driven by consumer culture.
Slowing Down Fast Fashion airs at the National Wool Museum on 15 March as part of the Fibre and Fashion film series.