The Nettle Dress

Film details

Film TitleThe Nettle Dress
Suitability
Genre
Length68mins
Year2023
CountryUnited Kingdom
DirectorDylan Howitt
LanguageEnglish
Showings

Textile artist Allan Brown spends seven years making a dress by hand from foraged stinging nettles, all picked on the South Downs near Brighton. This is ‘hedgerow couture’, the greenest of slow fashion. It’s also his medicine, the way he survives the death of his wife that left him and his four children bereft.

Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.