Out of Thin Air

In the mid-1950s, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, young composers and romantic partners, are hired by legendary silent film star Gloria Swanson to write a musical based on her film Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder in 1950.

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.