The Man in the White Suit + Q&A

• Duration: 85 minutes
• Director: Alexander Mackendrick
• Country: United Kingdom
• Year: 1951
• Rating: (U)

Join us for the second day of the Fashion Revolution Weekend!

The Man in the White Suit 

An altruistic chemist invents a fabric which resists wear and stain as a boon to humanity, but big business and labor realize it must be suppressed for economic reasons. 

Like other so-called Ealing comedies, this popular comedy takes issue with the fabric of British society, and in this case the issue is capitalism. At the centre of the drama is the invention of a fabric which will never require maintenance and will never wear out. While this might seem to be a brilliant opportunity, reactions to the invention display the centrality of obsolescence to consumption, and the entanglement of factory workers livelihoods within this. It offers us an opportunity to think about the roe of technology and waste in the fashion industry today, as well as explore our own sometimes conflicted attitudes to newness, whiteness, perfected surfaces and mending.

For the Q&A after the film, we will be joined by Dr Vanessa Brown, researcher, writer and teacher in the department of Fashion and Textiles at Nottingham Trent University, and Dr Katherine Townsend, Professor of Fashion and Textile Practice at Nottingham Trent University.

Amy is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University. Her international participatory project, Fashion Fictions, brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. Other initiatives include Reknit Revolution, a project supporting knitters to rework the items in their wardrobes. Amy has authored and edited several books, including 'Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes' (2017).