In recent years, the line between film and fashion has become increasingly blurred. Actresses front ad campaigns for fashion houses, while models such as Agyness Deyn, Stacy Martin and Cara Delevingne have taken to the big screen. There has also been a growing number of films about the fashion world: last year saw the release of the documentary Dior and I, Albert Maysles’ last film Iris, about the interior designer and textile manufacturer Iris Apfel, and two feature films about Yves Saint Laurent.

But if 2015 was the year of the style biopic, this is the year of the ready-to-wear movie: Tom Ford, the Rodarte sisters (Kate and Laura Mulleavy) and Tara Subkoff (who spent much of the 2000s as half of the high-end, upcycling line Imitation of Christ) are each taking a turn in the director’s chair.

Ford’s authority as a director is well proven. His first film, 2009’s A Single Man, starring Colin Firth, won a Bafta (and was nominated for an Oscar), and the rights to his follow-up were subject to a bidding war in Cannes last May. Focus Features paid more than $20m for Nocturnal Animals, which is due to be released this year. A book adaptation, like A Single Man, it is based on Austin Wright’s 1993 thriller Tony and Susan about a divorcee sent a dark, fantastical novel written by her ex-husband.

Ford has been instrumental in melding the worlds of fashion and film. Last February, he moved his catwalk show from London to Los Angeles, just as the awards season got under way, staging it in Hollywood before the likes of Julianne Moore and Amy Adams (who will star in Ford’s new film alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Isla Fisher). Earlier that month, Moore wore a low-cut ruby dress by the designer to collect her Bafta.

Last season, Ford suspended his SS16 catwalk show and instead commissioned photographer Nick Knight to film a staged performance starring Lady Gaga. “I wanted to think about how to present a collection in a cinematic way that was designed from its inception to be presented online,” Ford said.

It was also in Cannes that the Mulleavys announced their debut feature Woodshock, which the West Coast design duo have written and are directing together; the pair were on the Croisette to secure international distributors. While the sisters are refusing to discuss the details of their movie debut, it tells the story of a paranoiac woman, involves drugs, and stars Kirsten Dunst and Boyhood actress Lorelei Linklater.

What attracts designers to the world of celluloid? “I love storytelling and was constantly trying to inject that into fashion,” says Tara Subkoff, whose debut film #Horror was released in the US in November and is scheduled for distribution in the UK. Starring Chloë Sevigny, this teenage cyberbullying thriller (designers are clearly drawn to dark tales about psychological terror) is set in an isolated Connecticut home filled with contemporary art that was curated for the film by artist Urs Fischer, who happens to be Subkoff’s husband.

“I made shorts and video pieces, and we have hosted conceptualised performances all over the world, from São Paulo to the Havana Film Festival,” says the designer, who began her career as an actress and has always incorporated film and performance into her hybrid fashion-art brand. In 2013, Subkoff enclosed model/actress Milla Jovovich in a glass box for the Venice Biennale.

“In fashion you have to make decisions very fast,” she says. “Film moves much more slowly, but it helps to have a clear aesthetic and to be able to communicate what you want with clarity.”

For Subkoff, #Horror was also an opportunity to play with the power of clothes on character: “It was fun figuring out what Chloë Sevigny was going to wear,” she says of the actress, whom she met on the set of Whit Stillman’s 1998 film The Last Days of Disco. “I wanted her to be like a 1990s supermodel meets a trophy wife who’s not happy with her lot. So she dresses in Alaïa — even though that doesn’t fit her life.” The most memorable of Sevigny’s costumes is in the opening scene: a Busby Berkeley bathing suit and floor-sweeping cover-up decorated in origami that comes from the Imitation of Christ archive.

While the move from fashion designer to film director can spark scepticism — #Horror has had rather mixed reviews — many designers, like Subkoff, identify themselves as storytellers. The Mulleavy sisters in particular have always invested their work with a richly imagined narrative and worked with a team of Hollywood-based collaborators — including actors Elijah Wood and Dunst — to capture the mood of their collections. That they should have shifted their focus on to film seems a natural progression. And film is increasingly becoming part of the fashion experience: Karl Lagerfeld made a short film starring Kristen Stewart to support the Chanel Métiers d’Art show in Rome last December, while Alessandro Michele is directing video content at Gucci.

So who might be next to pick up the camera? Certainly Erdem Moralioglu has always had a filmic vision: for his AW15 catwalk show, he built a set with artist Robin Brown that imagined a noirish world for that season’s woman inspired by Fellini and Hitchcock, all set to a looping soundtrack from La Dolce Vita; his SS16 “Prairie Madness” collection, meanwhile, conjured a deserted Outback railway station.

“It’s fascinating getting to grips with a character so forensically,” he says of his process. “It allows you to literally piece together who this girl is.” Right now, however, he has no plans to make a movie. For some designers, it’s enough to keep the drama on the catwalk.