The Nettle Dress is described as “a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft”. It’s the story of textile artist Allan Brown who spent seven years making a dress from scratch using only fibre sourced from locally foraged nettles. Filmmaker Dylan Howitt has been a close friend of Browns for over 30 years and initially filmed him for fun while he was spinning flax as part of his early experiments into making thread from nettles. The resulting ‘how to’ video went viral and turned into this film documentary. Howitt has skilfully and lovingly compressed seven years of love, loss, and labour into 70 minutes of enthralling story telling.
Nettles (Urtica dioica) are native to Europe and familiar to anyone who walks through a wood or passes an abandoned patch of ground. For most people they trigger an immediate sense of danger usual linked to some childhood trauma of being stung, which was the case with the film’s subject Allan Brown, who fell out of a tree into a patch of nettles as a child and was stung all over. He wonders if this was why they resonated with him so much later in life and he talks about their ubiquity and “fuck you attitude” (NB: the spikes, or trichomes/spicules, are tiny needles that inject painful chemicals into the skin which cause the stinging sensation).
The film explores a poignant metaphor of moving passed pain. Allan Brown experienced the death of his father followed a few years later by the heart-breaking death of his wife Alex at only 45. The parallel of pain through loss versus the pain of the sting is in the literal, and metaphoric, grasping of the nettle. Brown was able to find some peace, and even healing, through the process of harvesting, stripping, and spinning the fibres. Spinning with a drop spindle was particularly cathartic as he would do this both by his father’s hospital bedside and in the room while his wife was sleeping during her illness. The love for Alex from Brown, their children, family and friends is palpable and very moving, and Brown sees those days, with what he was thinking and feeling at the time, as “somehow being recorded in the thread”.
In the way that synonyms have antonyms, so this tale moves from the stinging nature of the nettle and death, through processing grief and nettle fibre into yarn, to a kind of peace as we ultimately arrive at with the assembly of the dress. The dress is a totem representing seven years of labour that involved stripping away the hard outer stalk to get to the soft fibre, retting, spinning it all into yarn and then painstakingly weaving it into cloth on a hand loom (25 feet of cloth was required along with 14,400 feet of thread). It was also a pleasure to watch Brown’s beautiful (and often scene stealing) dog Bonnie, who was not only a companion on his trips out to gather nettles, but also sits calmly by his side throughout the process of spinning and weaving.
Adults apparently have an average attention span of 8.25 seconds and we live in a world of fast fashion, The Fast & Furious, Marvel/DC, and myriad streaming services overflowing with more shows than we could binge in a lifetime. I believe there is a part of us that recognises the need to slow down, be in the moment, and find some calm in the chaos. Director Dylan Howitt has tapped into the tranquillity of Allan Brown’s textile odyssey; his compulsion to make a dress by hand when we could buy one with the click of a mouse (although ASOS and boohoo don’t currently stock nettle dresses on their sites).
Despite condensing seven years of filming into 70 minutes the film never rushes to get anywhere and truly honours the pace and dedication of Brown’s work. It also helps that, as a subject, Brown is warm and charismatic and laughs at how ridiculous the task seems. But this is not merely a film about a man making a dress, it is about coming to terms with loss, the strength of family and friendship, and the beauty in slowing the world down enough to appreciate life itself and not how fleeting it can be.
As we are predominantly a music site I also wanted to mention Alex Munslow’s gorgeous original soundtrack which easily matches the magical feeling of the film. Even more surprising given that he had not composed for film before, and this might explain why I have not been able to find his music online anywhere. I, for one, would wholeheartedly encourage the release of a soundtrack album. However, the film also uses ‘The Birds In The Spring’, a traditional composition sung by Liz Pearson, and this is available on Bandcamp.
I cannot recommend this film enough and you should be able to catch it during its countrywide tour which runs into April next year. You can see the film list of screenings via this page and some screenings are also accompanied by a Q&A with Allan Brown and Dylan Howitt.
Follow Allan Brown via Hedgerow Culture
Follow filmmaker Dylan Howitt on Instagram and via his website
The Nettle Dress Website & Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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THE NETTLE DRESS from Dylan Howitt on Vimeo.
A full list of where you can see The Nettle Dress can be found here
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