Dr Marketa Uhlirova

Biography

I am an art historian with an interest in the display, representation and mediation of fashion and dress, especially in the moving image. In 2005 I co-founded the Fashion in Film Festival, the first major exhibition, research and education project to explore the common ground between the worlds of fashion, cinema and art. My film programmes have been hosted by arts venues internationally, including London's Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Barbican and BFI Southbank; Palazzo Grassi in Venice; Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen and Museum of the Moving Image in New York. In 2017 I co-curated, with Tom Gunning, the 10th anniversary festival season entitled ‘Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream’ and co-directed the film The Inferno Unseen with the artist and musician Rollo Smallcombe.

Since 2006 I have edited Fashion in Film's publications, including Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (2013, Koenig Books, winner of The Most Beautiful Swiss Book Award in 2014), If Looks Could Kill (2008, Koenig Books) and, with Caroline Evans, Marcel L'Herbier: Dossier (2014, FFF). My articles and book chapters have appeared in publications including Maison Sonia Delaunay (ed. Waleria Dorogova, 2022), The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory (ed. Kyle Stevens, 2022), Journal of Visual Culture, Fashion Theory, Screen, Aperture, AnOther, Fashion Media: Past & Present (ed. D. Bartlett, S. Cole and A. Rocamora, 2014), and Czech Cinema Revisited: Politics, Genres, Techniques (ed. L. Česálková, 2016).

I am interested in how fashion is presented and represented across multiple cultural and commercial platforms and media, from exhibitions and retail to literature and photography and the moving image. Much of my research over the past two decades has been linked to the Fashion in Film Festivals, which I have curated since 2006. Through them, I have explored different ways in which to conceptualise intersections between the moving image, fashion and costume, and more widely, visual problems of design. I am passionate about working in film archives to rediscover and reconsider lost, obscure and rarely-seen films, as well as creating imaginative curatorial frameworks that cast film works (known and unknown) in a new light so as to bring them to new audiences. The festival is interdisciplinary by its definition and actively promotes encounters by bringing together filmmakers, fashion designers and image-makers, artists, curators, film archivists, historians and writers.

My research has focused on issues of cultural stigmatisation; the styling of crime and violence; spectacle, experience and perception of clothing in the moving image; use of entertainment for purposes of political propaganda; the impact of the moving image on the fashion industry of the digital era; and, more recently, the figuration of time through dress in cinema. I have programmed and written about films and moving image works from a range of historical periods and contexts, including early cinema, arthouse, artist and experimental film, Hollywood and European commercial cinema, newsreels, commercials and fashion films.