The Nettle Dress, 2023. Directed by Dylan Howitt.
IF WE TOOK TIME TO LISTEN to plants, what might we learn? Dylan Howitt’s 2023 documentary The Nettle Dress pursues this question by handing creation the microphone. The film follows Howitt’s good friend, British textile artist Allan Brown, in his seven-year devotion to a single task: creating a garment from nettles. Howitt’s camera traces the process from start to finish, plant to garment, creation to new creation. This film is as much about the nettle plant—its life cycle, its creative potential, and its interaction with its ecosystem—as it is about Brown. As one of the film’s protagonists, the nettle speaks through Brown’s handiwork.
Observing a film awash in closeups of nettles was, at first, disconcerting for me, as my interactions with the plants have been frequent and unpleasant. Nettles are native throughout northern Europe, and I came to know them well during summers in the west of Ireland. My brother and I would traipse through the fields surrounding my grandparents’ home in County Mayo and run into the plants—literally. As Brown notes in the film, “Nettles find you, rather than the other way around.” Inevitably, one of us would sting our legs on the tiny spines, and the other would frantically search through the brush for a dock leaf to spit on, crush, and rub on the affected area. (This treatment’s effectiveness has been contested by some, but it worked for us.) These experiences have made me nettle averse, and my reflex was to cringe at the camera’s attentiveness to the dangerous plant.
Film still from The Nettle Dress.
In the film, Brown describes his first brush with nettles. As a child, he was climbing a tree with friends when a branch broke and he fell into a large clump. He remembers a “complete body immersion in the sting, just overwhelming”—a description that resonates with me. Yet this was not enough to repel Brown from the plant for good. Years later, he approached nettles again, a wildflower book in hand. Finding a nettle, he rubbed off the leaves, took a stalk in his hand, split it in two, and separated the fiber from the core, then began kneading the fiber into a kind of thread. “Within the first few minutes of starting to spin, I could see the quality of the yarn. It feels miraculous.”
Two years later, having accumulated enough familiarity with the nettle—and enough fiber—Brown first attempted weaving it, and his task was set in motion. The Nettle Dress captures each phase of this laborious process—harvesting the plants, spinning them into fibers, weaving the fibers into fabric, and designing and stitching a bespoke dress for his youngest daughter, Oonagh.
In making nettle cloth, Brown joins fiber makers across history, including his own ancestors. Mulling over their work, Brown notes: “The amount of labor that would go into creating a piece of fabric large enough to do something useful with, it just doesn’t fit into any current model without being a piece of art. Without meaning it to be, it becomes a richer object. So precious.” Though we viewers can’t touch the plants, thread, or textile, the film delivers a sensory feast. We breathe in the beauty of the nettles in the woods and can almost feel the fabric’s gentle, fibrous embrace.
Brown’s is no easy feat, but efficiency is not the point. Instead, he lets his local ecosystem in Brighton, East Sussex, guide his work, deferring to the seasons. In the
Film still from The Nettle Dress.
summer, he collects nettles, leaving them on the grass to dry before breaking the stalks to extract the fiber from the core. In the winter, he spins the fibers into thread with a drop spindle. His timeframe runs counter to corporate profit-maximizing, which pushes for faster production and greater volume. Across seven years of filming, he comes to understand the world around him—and the worlds contained in the nettle plant—in new ways. The Nettle Dress documents two journeys: the making of a garment and the enriching of the senses.
As we watch him in the fields and forests near his home, Brown’s affection for the plant is unmistakable: in one scene, he delights in the seemingly mundane sight of a nettle cluster puffing out clouds of pollen. “Look!” he exclaims, and the camera obeys, then turns back to Brown, whose face is alight with awe. It’s hard to find this joy anything but endearing—and infectious. (It’s also easy to see the friendship between the filmmaker and his subject.) As the documentary progressed, I felt myself soften toward nettles as I became attuned to the inner wisdom of a plant I had very much disliked. What I once regarded as a nuisance, a painful weed, I now understood as a plant full of creative potential. As Brown puts it, “Their sting puts you out of your slumber.”
Artist and writer Jenny Odell refers to this kind of awakening, this perceptual shift, as “re-noticing the world.” In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, she laments how our attention has been misdirected. We give our attention—our biggest asset—to the gig economy, the internet, and unbridled consumption, in search of satisfaction, relief, and self-understanding. In our distraction, we fail to encounter the full world around us. Odell wants to revive our awareness of the earth as a complex web of relationships. She prescribes “practices of noticing” as an antidote to ecological disconnection. As she ponders the waterways in her hometown of Oakland, Odell’s world expands. She notices new actors and quirks in her environment, which “had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.” She comes to encounter the inhabitants of her bioregion—from western fence lizards to gray pines and giant sequoias—with sharpened senses, fully present.
In The Nettle Dress, Brown’s habit of basking in the ecological processes occurring just beyond his doorstep reveals him to be a man entirely awake. He has, I surmise, done Odell’s prescribed work, and he beholds his world with full clarity.
Odell describes the need for structures that hold “open a contemplative space, against pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.” One place she finds this possibility is in public art, which can break through our perceptual slumber. By documenting what it means to approach the created world with tender understanding, The Nettle Dress does something similar. Through Brown’s ecological attunement, this film extends a powerful invitation to the viewer: to re-notice the world by taking a small plant seriously. I accepted this invitation as I watched, observing the nettle’s dutiful processes, its seasonal changes and stasis, and its pas de deux with Brown.
We never hear Brown profess any creedal faith, though at one point he playfully refers to the damp nettle cloth as “the Turin shroud,” but I find his labor spiritually resonant. I couldn’t ignore the synchronicities between Brown’s fiber making and the long history of sartorial labor in the Christian monastic tradition.
In Clothes and Monasticism in Ancient Christian Egypt, Norwegian religion scholar Ingvild Sælid Gilhus details how fourth- and fifth-century monasteries made cloth goods using fibers from halfa grasses, rushes, sedges, palm leaves, flax, and wool. Monks would collect these fibers—picking wild plants, planting and harvesting flax, and breeding and shearing sheep—then process them: “Ascetics and monastics plaited ropes and spun thread; wove mats, baskets, cloths, and ribbons; and made garments.” As Gilhus notes, the fruits of this labor were “part of the necessary equipment” of the monastery. As well as making their own habits, the monks could sell fiber wares to raise funds for the community and support its work.
When we think of garment making, we might envision an impersonal process: items mass-produced by robots, sent through numerous chemical baths to be starched and spotless upon arrival at a store. Yet this sterile vision does not capture the full story. Even mass-produced clothes pass through innumerable hands, connecting us to farm and factory workers, ranchers and shepherds, weavers, pattern-makers, repairers of machinery, container-ship crews, truck drivers, retail workers, and people who work in sweatshops and warehouses. No garment is a tactile tabula rasa. Rather, they are painstakingly—and often painfully—interwoven into the systems that pervade our world.
In monastic communities, fiber work reinforced relational ties. Monks and nuns literally clothed their brothers and sisters by their work, making each one’s habit a kind
Photo by Allan Brown.
of interpersonal encounter. And the integration of labor and prayer extended the encounter to include the divine. Gilhus writes that “the monasteries usually had several looms…but the monastics also did handiwork in their cells on a daily basis”—in other words, during private prayer. Theologian Dom Armand Veilleux writes that in the Pachomian monasteries “monks constantly prayed during their work and…did weaving and plaiting during the synaxis” (gatherings for liturgy). Gilhus proposes that “the process of twisting fibers and making fiber-based products interacted closely with the spiritual and meditative life in the monasteries.” In light of the Matthean promise that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them,” working side by side at the loom became an occasion for monastics to encounter Christ. In this way, they were ever immersed in practices of re-noticing the world as relationally interwoven.
Reflecting on preindustrial garment making, Brown imagines the ties between maker and wearer: “You’d be making it for your immediate family, and the love you’ve put into the cloth can be worn.” His observation has a mystical quality. In it one might recognize an echo of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Wild Swans,” in which a princess is tasked with making nettle shirts to restore the humanity of her siblings, who have been turned into swans. Brown’s labor for his daughter imbues the nettles with love—a love made tangible in the film through shots of Brown and Oonagh together—intermingled with loss and other weights. Oonagh remarks, “It definitely feels like there’s lots of memories and love through this whole thing.”
In the documentary, Brown discloses two losses that occurred during the making of the dress: the deaths of his father and wife. His nettle work accompanied him throughout these sorrows—he spun nettles on a drop spindle at his father’s bedside, and throughout his wife’s cancer diagnosis, decline, and eventual death. Brown notes, “My memory of that period is her sleeping…hours of stillness as she slept and I spun.” Brown’s bedside watch strikes me as a kind of prayer, grounding each day in the sinews of the earth through the plants in his hands. As he weathers these storms, Brown’s spinning takes on a meditative form inseparable from his suffering and that of his loved ones. “Inadvertently, all of that [is] going into the thread,” he says.
Religious studies scholar Rebecca Krawiec proposes that “the monk has access to a visual memory map by looking at his own clothing.” For Krawiec, monastic dress reminds its wearer of deeper spiritual meanings that make up the institutional memory of the Christian faith. When a monk dons his habit, he is reminded of his vows to Christ and the history of his order. The nettle fibers also provide a memory map of sorts for Brown. As he grasps the cloth, he reflects: “It feels like it’s been a process of weaving a shroud. Because it was totally there to absorb loss and grief.” As a record and witness to this grief, the nettle undergoes a transformation: from plant to garment, from cause of pain to repository for it—and perhaps even memorial to it.
As well as Brown’s pain, the nettles also bear witness to pain keenly felt across the earth. Walking the fields and woods, Brown cannot ignore the land’s depletion: “We’re just left with these little ribbons of semi-wildness and big areas of barrenness and fences almost devoid of insect life, bird life. They’re actually kind of deserts.” Brown receives this reality, one reflecting global ecological devastation, with calm. The re-noticing prompted by this film includes confronting a reality that becomes more difficult to conceal by the day: the sufferings of the earth itself.
Photo by Mark Carroll.
In the face of this, how easy it is to crumple under the weight of despair. But in the nettles, Brown sees a sign of hope: “The tenacity of nettles means that they can endure.” Reflecting on their transformation, he notes: “The threads are weak. The mind and body have been weak. But now, this [cloth] is really strong.” Christian monastics regarded the habits they wore as repositories of spiritual strength; Brown regards the nettle dress as a repository of physical strength, a gift to his daughter, a “protective cloth” steadying her for life’s long journey. Howitt’s film, if we watch attentively, likewise clothes its viewers with strength. In it I found a deep spiritual logic that pays homage to monastic wisdom.
For example, Brown’s labor reflects a countercultural approach to time. In sharp contrast to the frenzied pace of the contemporary garment industry, he takes seven years to make one dress. At every turn, he defers to the earth’s time, allowing the seasons to guide his process. The nettle cloth “keeps demanding that you take the slow road,” laughs Brown, as he kneads the fabric with a stone to lighten it. Every part of the process brings slowness, and, as he observes, fills the garment with intention.
Furthermore, by adhering to the earth’s timing, which is set in motion by God’s timing, Brown models an awareness that his life and needs are not the center of the universe. Such is the fruit of re-noticing the world. The desert monks and nuns ordered their lives around prayer and work, toward love of God and neighbor, thus embracing an understanding of time that incarnates the New Commandment of Jesus. The monastics re-notice the creation and act accordingly, and Brown does the same.
Finally, by giving seven years of his life to the forest, the nettles, and the making of this garment, Brown’s work proclaims a central insight of the Incarnation: that matter matters. The stuff of our garments—and all created goods—need not be destined for the trash heap. Rather, matter is good and worth investing in because God gladly entered into matter.
What is the fruit of this understanding? Christian theologian Christy Lang Hearlson posits that “when we value things, we are more likely—like a providential God!—to attempt their repair, protection, and maintenance.” The monastics embodied this commitment by creating clothes from the earth and by recirculating them through their community. Gilhus writes that garments “were mended, and…frequently reused before they were finally reduced to rags.” These practices not only illustrate a commitment to poverty and holding property in common but also convey respect for God’s creation—and the new creations fashioned by their brethren.
We see Brown enact the same respect for creation as he stitches together the dress with flax and nettle fibers. He recognizes that while “the time that has been put into creating is huge…the actual environmental cost feels very low.” Watching his daughter as she moves through the woods in the dress, Brown serenely notes, “When this is at the end of its life, it can be laid back down in Limekiln Wood. And there’ll be no plastic or trace of it.” A happy death for a garment, indeed.
And what about those of us who are not monks or fiber artists? While most of our clothes may not be made of nettles or created by our loved ones, they are still woven into a relational ecosystem that seeks our attention. While watching this film, I found myself wondering what the world might look like if we were quicker to choose repair over abandonment, gratitude over entitlement, and the earth’s timing over corporate timing. When we educate ourselves about the life cycle of our clothes—their creation, consumption, disposal, and the people and places they affect—we are faced with an opportunity to disrupt business as usual in ways large and small. We can become people who are fully awake—and can awaken others.
Certain films provide us with images that nourish our understanding of the present world by revealing the world we ought to inhabit. The Nettle Dress carefully, slowly, and joyfully achieves this end by dwelling on Allan Brown’s sustained, tender, and earth-honoring labor, and on the beauty of its fruit: a striking dress made from the earth itself. At sixty-eight minutes long, this remarkably rich documentary is a sensory pilgrimage. At its conclusion, I sat for a few minutes in silence. Then I peered out my window. I let my eyes rest on a tree branch, its leaves rustling in the breeze. In these leaves, and in each leaf since, I have found an enduring invitation to encounter the world anew.
Céire Kealty is a writer and scholar with a great love for clothing, community, and Christianity. She holds a PhD in theology from Villanova University and lives in the greater Philadelphia area.
