From runway to reel: UAL's festival redefines the fashion film genre

The inaugural Future Fashion Film Festival hosted by University of the Arts London (UAL) concluded this week at its new East Bank campus with an awards ceremony that offered a lens into the next generation of fashion image-makers. Held at the London College of Fashion’s recently opened headquarters in Stratford, the event aimed to position the medium of fashion film not as a digital sideshow but as a serious mode of visual storytelling, increasingly relevant to both brand building and artistic expression.

Among a broad field of emerging talent, Zhaodong Zeng emerged as the standout voice, taking both the Grand Prize and Best Fashion Film awards for Liminal Space—a work that blends 2D animation and live-action to interrogate the ephemeral quality of rave spaces. The film was notable not just for its aesthetic ambition, but for its conceptual rigour, treating subcultural nightlife as a liminal zone where digital and physical realities collide. Zeng will receive commercial representation from Park Village Studios, alongside production resources and mentorship—a notable launchpad for a filmmaker who appears to sit comfortably at the intersection of speculative design, cinema, and fashion.

The festival jury—drawn from across disciplines including choreography, art direction, and animation—awarded a further six prizes, reflecting the diversity of format and tone emerging in contemporary fashion film. Among the winners:

• Junie Lau (Best Digital Innovation) for e^(i)+1=0, a mathematically poetic title that hints at the film’s conceptual orientation
• Perry Curties (Best Fashion Documentary) for Bike Life, a study of urban cycling subcultures
• Chenshuo Xu (Best Animation) for Ode to the Centaur, which combined mythological references with digital surrealism
• Polina Kulbachevskaia (Best Performance)
• Jessie Curry (Best Activism in a Fashion Context)

Zeng’s Liminal Space stood apart for its cinematic language and referential depth, suggesting the medium is maturing into one that can borrow fluently from arthouse and mainstream idioms alike. For an industry increasingly reliant on motion media—especially in digital marketing, immersive retail, and brand storytelling—the festival signals a growing appetite for new visual languages not bound by traditional advertising or fashion week formats.

Notably, two collaborative awards pointed to industry interest in surfacing new voices: Paola Nerilli won the Nowness Picks prize for Liminal Realm, while Tom Oliver received the Hi-Fi Initiative award for Fíodóra, supported by Hidden Agency, Panavision and Island Studios.

The venue itself—London College of Fashion’s sprawling new East Bank home—is not incidental to the festival’s positioning. By hosting this in the heart of London’s newest cultural district, UAL is making a pointed claim about the future of fashion media: one that’s inclusive, experimental, and attuned to cross-disciplinary collaboration. The programme, while still in its infancy, reflects a wider recalibration within fashion education—moving beyond catwalks and lookbooks to embrace film as a mode of critique, exploration, and even activism.

While much of the event maintained the optimistic tone typical of student showcases, the most successful films exhibited a sharp understanding of the tensions shaping contemporary fashion: the blur between the real and virtual, the pull between spectacle and substance, and the question of how fashion can remain expressive in a media landscape saturated with content.

Whether Future Fashion Film Festival will become a critical calendar event remains to be seen. But if the work of Zeng and his contemporaries is any indication, the fashion film is no longer an accessory to the runway—it may soon be the main stage.